


Genesis

by oxfordRoulette



Series: Underworld [5]
Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bloody Hilarious, Body Horror, Dysphoria of the Cosmic Sense, F/F, F/M, Graphic Cannibalistic Thoughts, Illustrated, Mild Sexual Content, Original Mythology
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-24
Updated: 2015-12-04
Packaged: 2018-04-10 22:29:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 35,990
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4410221
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxfordRoulette/pseuds/oxfordRoulette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The finale of the Underworld series. You won't be able to read this without reading the <a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/68271">other four fics</a> (all of them).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dave Strider vs The World

**Author's Note:**

> IMPORTANT:
> 
> If you haven't read any of the Underworld series, I recommend reading in one of two paths.
> 
> **Path 1: Jade is clearly the best character in this series** | **Path 2: What do you mean Rose dies? I'm filled with existential dread.**  
> ---|---  
> [Jade](http://archiveofourown.org/works/910444/chapters/1763468) | [Rose](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3087722/chapters/6692165)  
> [Dave](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1378738/chapters/2885827) | [Dave](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1378738/chapters/2885827)  
> [Rose](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3087722/chapters/6692165) | [Jade](http://archiveofourown.org/works/910444/chapters/1763468)  
> [John](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3847435/chapters/8588626) | [John](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3847435/chapters/8588626)  
>   
> A few things for you. Updates will be at a slow, putzy pace. Make sure to check the tags for this story. There are now heavy-handed symbolic illustrations so you won't be confused about who's narrating. Have fun.

**Dave Strider**

_High Priest and General of the Church of TZ, He Who Rolls as a Lawful Good Paladin When Playing D &D, Best Rebound Boyfriend In the Known Universe_

* * *

You’re playing Mario Kart Double Dash with TZ on a lazy, sweaty night when your phone rings.

You ignore it because, c’mon, red shells ain’t going to throw themselves and you’ve got to pass TZ in these next five seconds or you’re falling off the endless hellpit of rainbow road. But as soon as the last notes of your ringtone ([Build Me Up Buttercup by Rhymefest Ft Ol' Dirty Bastard](https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=aG897lNXLcg#t=19)) fade into nothingness, it starts ringing again.

You keep on ignoring Ol’ Dirty Bastard, may his soul rest in peace, in favor of doing a left drift around that seizure inducing hairpin turn. Princess Peach smacks her ass in glee when you pass your patron god on the right. Your phone ceases its siren song… aaaaaaaand immediately rings for a third time.

Terezi pauses the game, then turns to you, her arm lolling backwards against the end of the couch. “Dave, if I have to listen to that objectively awful song one more time, I am hurling this controller straight into your forehead. And, I warn you, I will enjoy it. Check your phone!”

“Whatever you say, babe.” You pick it up from the arm of the couch and take a look at the vibrating, rapping contact. It’s Jade. Wow, you thought she for sure would have deleted your number from her mobile device, guess she must be getting nostalgic for you or something. Well, sorry Jade, you don’t do booty calls.

“Girl wants you back,” says TZ, grinning over your shoulder. “You should probably tell her you’re betrothed to me. I bought you with three goats and a cow! They do not come cheap.”

“Yeah, the courting ritual and dowry have already been fully arraigned. I won’t be a blushing virgin bride for long. Jade Harley wouldn’t want my body defiled by the sins of the marriage bed.”

“Swoon! The morning-after bedsheets are going to be soaked in sexy blood when they’re displayed to the village after I’m done with you, Dave.”

“Well, that is hands down the most boner killing thing you have ever said.” You glance at your phone again. It’s still ringing. “Yeah, I’m not going to answer this. If it’s really that fucking important she’s going to have to leave a voice mail in the DStrides queue, the old fashioned way. I’ll turn the sound off and save your sensitive ears from Rhymefest’s smooth smooth baritone.”

The fourth call goes unanswered just as you set your volume to zero, and you’re immediately greeted by a series of buzzings so intense, a horny teenager could easily use it to get off. You swipe the screen to see your text messages, and watch in complete mortification as they roll in at light speed.

PICK UP YOUR PHONE.  
PICK UP YOUR PHONE.  
PICK UP YOUR PHONE AND CALL JADE.  
ARE YOU SERIOUS? THIS ISN’T WORKING? LET ME TRY THIS MYSTERIOUS TECHNOLOGICAL SPEECH-TO-TEXT FEATURE.  
© Ã³kor; kè£ç½®ä¹‹å電éœé›  
FUCK.  
PUT ME DOWN FOR THE RECORD THAT I AM NOW ETERNALLY CURSING THE COMMUNICATION LIMITATIONS OF THE MODERN ERA.  
ALRIGHT, DAVID LALONDE STRIDER, WHOSE NAME I KNOW DESPITE NOT LOOKING AT THE TITLE CARD. YOU WIN! YOU WIN IT ALL! YOU’VE KEPT UP YOUR COOL, NONCHALANT PERSONA AND NEGLECTED TO ANSWER YOUR PHONE, JUST LIKE THE SLICKEST GANGS OF CHICAGO. YOU ARE THE COOLEST.  
OKAY? I  
UGH  
I’M ONLY GOING TO ASK THIS ONCE.  
I’M GOING TO CALL YOU AGAIN.  
WILL YOU PLEASE  
PLEASE PICK UP YOUR PHONE.  
THINGS HAVE GONE VERY, VERY WRONG.  
AND I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M GOING TO DO.

You skim over the texts again as Terezi picks at her acrylic nails. “Uh, TZ? I think Jade got murder-kidnapped and her killer is texting me. Give me your holy wisdom. Should I answer the phone?”

She grins. “A full serving of justice requires a thorough investigation! We’ll have to go on a revenge spree if this mysterious texter turns out to be the killer.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

When the phone rings again, you push the green button, hold it up to your ear, and say, “Where’d you hide the body?”

What greets you is the sound of some people screaming, an engine, and two explosions, all steeped in the 420-blaze-it haze of bad cell phone reception.

“What?” you say, into the phone. Like the person on the other end could even hear you.

There’s some more screaming, some thunder, and another three explosions. The dry kind, not the fire-y kind. The kind of explosion that sounds like someone slammed a chunk of drywall into a paper mache hot air balloon.

You hear coughing on the other end, then everything is magically clear. “Sorry,” says the voice. It is definitely not Jade, this voice sounds like songbirds wailing through a lowered-pitch megaphone. “You should hear me now, I’m doing some shitty speech trick, capeesh?”

That annoying cheesegrater drawl sounds familiar. The bad kind of familiar. The kind of familiar you don’t want to meet in a dark alleyway. Oh, shit. “You’re _that_ guy. That I guy I played heavenly wife-swap with. Jesus shit, get behind me Satan. Wait, before you do that, are you actually dating Jade? Curious minds want to know.”

Terezi snaps her head up to glare at the phone, like Karkat could hear her stare. He says, “What? I don’t know, she’s probably just using me. We fuck a lot.”

You can’t tell if that’s a joke or not, which is really unsettling. “Gross, dude, did not need to know that. I’m hanging up now.”

“Wait, wait, fucking wait!” says her ex. “Considering you just alluded to ‘wife swapping,’ I’m making the assumption you spend a lot of time with her? With Terezi. Are you in a close enough position to get her on the goddamn long distance communicative device? That’s why I’m calling. It’s ridiculously important. Process that through your minuscule thoughtbox and put her on the line.”

You lower the receiver just enough to talk over it but also allow Karkat to hear every word you say. “Hey, light of my life and fire of my loins, my sin, my soul, Te-re-zi, how badly do you want to talk to your dick-ass terribad uggo husband?”

Terezi grins. You hear a muffled, frustrated scream on his side, and then he _tells_ you to put her on the line.

You’ve never heard anything like it. The one phrase he says -you don’t quite catch it- is so raw and rolls through your spine like dice being cast. Those few words are so packed with meaning and metaphor you’re appalled that you've ever attempted to write rap in your life. If you could talk like this guy does, if you could pile on word after word on top of each other like that, fuck, you could take over the world.

You can’t resist that beautifully crafted sentence, so you put the speaker on and set the phone between you and Terezi.

She facepalms. “Goddammit, Dave.”

“What? Sorry, dude’s a god of language, right? I’m putty in his hands.”

“Fuck yes, it worked,” says Karkat. “I take it back, my eternal blessings upon modern technology forever and fucking always. Anyway-”

He lapses into another language, something sharp and guttural that spends too much time on the consonants and not enough with the vowels. When he finishes, Terezi is silent for a long while, concentrating on something. After taking a deep breath, she finally says, “Darling, it appears I’ve forgotten our language.”

“What the fuck!? I am insulted beyond all belief right now, how in the actual hell did you manage to forget your first language? I *made* that for you!”

“Not all of us have that as our domain! And not all of us had the luxury of hibernating for a few centuries to stave off the boring parts of cultural assimilation!”

“I hate it when you- Oh, shit, hold on-” the phone goes all static and explosions and motor sounds again. And is that… rain? You also think you hear Jade’s voice somewhere, wailing. She shrieks once, then stops, and Karkat does his voice trick again to make everything sound clearer. “Sorry, Jade just got a lamppost stuck through her, it’s fine now.”

Your heart stops for a second. “What?”

“I hear the sickening tone of protective ex-boyfriend in your voice, and don’t worry, I’m the god of blood and flesh too, remember?” You have a feeling he’s pointing at himself here. “It’s all right as rain. Which I’m experiencing a lot of right now. Anyway, point of my call: I need help.”

Terezi looks bored. She stares wistfully at the Mario Kart game. You too, TZ. “With what?” she says.

“Vriska’s back.”

You’ve never heard of her. Terezi mouths the name, rolls it around on her tongue, trying it out. She must taste something in it, because she shoots up like a firecraker, her spine straight as a board and alert as a good watchdog. “She can’t be, she’s dead.”

“She’s not. It’s hard to explain.”

Terezi narrows her eyes and hisses, “You’re a god of language.”

“Alright, fine! Make me use my weirdly specific word choices, sure, whatever, here we go:”

Karkat starts describing what happened. And he does it so well with his mystical proto-language shit. It’s like you’re really there, watching the events go by your eyes in classic 80’s movie montage format. You’re there with Jade and Karkat, visiting John for his sweet concert you neglected to turn on the TV for (you don’t have basic cable, you figured you’d just Youtube it later). You watch John acting weird at the dinner table, watch him stare dreamily out the window in the middle of so many conversations. You watch him sit at his weird tiny electric organ in his house and just press the same keys, over and over. 

You’re Karkat confronting John about something. You watch John turn into this sneering, twisted bitch with just an expression shift. You can tell Karkat tries to describe the scene without all the dialogue. He’s trying to hide something that happened between him and Not-John. You think it’s about Jade. 

You watch John from the steps of a church, chest thrust out towards the cloudy sky, and he drops like a puppet for an instant as lightning strikes the tip of the belltowers. They crumble, crush all the folliage. You watch him straighten, rise, palms out, laughing. Rain and hail pour down and it’s painful on Karkat’s thin dress shirt. A dark, deep hurricane twists itself above you, mind-bogglingly massive. Bigger, angrier clouds than you've ever seen in your life. These clouds look like they're going to beat a dude up.

You’re on motorcycle with Jade, going forty miles an hour over torn pavement. You’re following the calm center of the storm and gazing up at Not-John floating miles above as cyclones and wind send chunks of building flying past your head.

When Karkat finishes describing what happened, you lunge for your phone. There’s no way that could all be true, like, you, Jade, and Rose stumbling haphazardly into a god’s arms is coincidence enough, but John? John works at a Catholic church for fuck’s sake, he should be protected from the one evil god by proxy. You don’t hang up, just Google the weather in Seattle.

Supertyphoon Marsha, they’re calling him. 800 miles in diameter. It came out of nowhere. “These things just don’t happen!” says a panicked weatherbabe on a blog post. “A hurricane this big can’t originate on landfall, it’s impossible! And especially not on this side of the Pacific.” 

No rescuers are able to be on scene. Estimated ten thousand deaths within five minutes. The whole of Washington is decimated. Vancouver’s already six feet underwater. Portland’s having trouble evacuating. The only reason they believe Seattle isn’t flooded yet is due to meteorological hubub all aligning just mathematically perfect to prevent a surge. But they’re predicting one in the next ten minutes.

John Egbert might be a huge fucking storm, but he’s an even bigger dumbass. You had absolutely no doubt he was the densest kid you’ve ever met, but you didn’t think he was _this_ dense. Although he must have improved on that front, since the guy is now officially a bunch of water vapor. Har har.

Terezi recovers faster than you. You guess she isn’t one to break out into cold sweats. “Kill him,” she says. “You don’t need my help. You can do that yourself.”

“Problem is,” says Karkat, sounding out of breath after that long description. “He can’t see or hear me. I can’t yell loud enough. And even if he could… he’s the god of sound, and he’s fucking ripped. He’d squash me like a bug. Unless if I use my one, soundless word, but that’ll erase him from existence. Jade won’t let me do it yet, and I’ve gotten way too soft since you and I last bumped into each other to use it without a guilty conscience.”

“Could you take down Vriska? Dave informed me Jade is a marksman. She could do it.” She bites her lip. “Vriska must be controlling him. If she’s gone, he is too.”

Karkat hesitates, before quietly saying. “No, I don’t think so. I didn’t tell you everything, but he’s fucking nuts for her. If Vriska was gone, he’d rip everything apart. More than now, anyway. You remember what we were like, right? On those bad days.”

Terezi folds her hands in front of her face, pressing two of her fingers in front of her lips. There’s silence for a few seconds. Jesus, she’s always a quick thinker, she must be pulling a plan out of the deep dark caverns of her mind for this scenario. Which, you guess, is a pretty good thing considering your bro just turned into a murder-death-storm over the entirety of the northwest coast.

“Karkat…” she says, very carefully. “You are absolutely certain, without a doubt, that you could obliterate John if you wanted to?”

“What? Yeah, of course. That’s my trump card.”

“And by doing that, you’re positive you could save all these people? Positive you could at the very least, save the rest from destruction?”

“Sure.”

“I want specifics.”

“Yes. Positive. Completely.”

Terezi is silent for another thirty seconds. You hear Karkat’s pained breathing over the phone as he probably struggles to hold on to Jade. She drives like Speed Racer on meth on a normal day, you’d hate to see what she’d do in the literal middle of a supertyphoon.

Terezi says, in that careful voice, like she’s walking on the eggshells of Karkat’s brain, “Okay. Listen to me very carefully, and do not instantly object: We’re going to get you to John’s level. We'll make it a fair fight.”

You and Karkat both say the words, “Fuck no,” at the exact same time, which only increases your dislike of the guy. You let Karkat talk, because you’re a gentleman and also he’d yell over you anyway.

“Okay, two reasons why that is a terrible idea. One: I don’t see human sacrifices lining up to die for me, and I don’t want to take them in even if they did. I’ve got nowhere to put them besides on Earth or into an infinite atheist void. I can’t do the void thing. And frankly, I like the one I have with me on Earth and don’t want anyone third-wheeling. Two: No! I hate, hate, hate, past-me. And I think most everyone else did too! Why would I want to become him again?”

“Because, not only can you stop John, and make him mortal again…” she says. “If you become as strong as you once were, you can also remake the whole Pacific coast. With everyone in it. You could do it with a single word, Karkat. I am suggesting we cut our losses, go for the goal, and once successful, we bring everything and everyone back with your words. Doing that will expend a huge amount of energy, and you return to the more mortal disposition you now have.”

“Oh ha ha, yeah, great plan, I’ll just become the antithesis to John and we can try to out-crazy each other. No. Nope. Hell no. Trust me when I say resurrecting all you dumbasses will be the last thing on my mind. Your shit plan doesn’t account for me being completely off my rocker once I’m full up on hypothetical human blood!”

“Yes it does. You’ll have Jade with you.” Her grin returns. “Don’t think I missed that little chat with Vriska you described. You tried to gloss over it with your fancy pants wordplay. You failed! You’d do anything for Miss Harley. She’ll tell you to take care of John, and you will, assuredly, follow her orders on leash and collar.”

Karkat sputters over the phone. You high five TZ. She keeps talking. “As for where to get your little human farm, well, let’s use what we have. You _could_ save the rest of the northwest coast, Karkat. You won’t. Those people will die because of you, will die for you, and all their precious little lives and the innards dangling from their mouths are yours for the taking. They will die for your plans, and they will give you your strength.”

You raise an eyebrow and say, “Hey, that’s breaking the rules, and I know how you love rules, TZ. You’re gaming the weird sacrifice system you wackos set up for yourself. Cheating the roulette wheel. Bugging the slot machine. They’re not technically _willing_ to die for Mister Hot Topic gore-fest over here, you’re just moving real people… Real fucking people… to pawns in this weird game of pass the power puck.”

She shrugs. “It works. We used to get around on technicalities all the time. Why not now?”

Karkat groans into the phone, then says, “Well, if that’s the best you’ve got, I’ll trust you. I’ll run the plan past Jade as we vault over this cement ledge right here, and take John down, then remake it all. Like they never even died. I’ll… I might be able to turn back time too. Eleven o’ clock, after the concert.” He breathes in deep, more for himself than for the two of you, then says, “I can do this.”

He hangs up. You stare at Terezi. She slides her hand back through her blond bangs so they stick to the top of her head. You reach out to touch her face, because she’s attractive and smooth and you’re a sentimental sap.

“Terezi,” you say. “No offense, but this is the shittiest plan ever.”

“I’m aware. Jade is a very tentative hold on mortality for him, but my plan will be a step in the right direction. And if it works out perfectly, great! But there’s a good chance it won’t.” She plucks your hand off her face, and gives it an acrylic-nail filled squeeze. Ouch. “So, we’re heading up there. I can do more once I assess the situation.”

“Uh, babe, hate to break it to you, but Seattle is ten million miles away. We might as well wait for Marsha Egbert to fly over Texas than to drive that far.”

She laughs, sharpened teeth glinting in your shitty apartment light. “Who said we were driving? We’re going mind-hopping. It’s much faster, and a convenient form of sightseeing into other people’s heads. And we’ll be picking up a friend on the way! I’ll have to call her and let her know we’ll be shooting out of her ear canal in about ten minutes.”

“Mind-hopping? Like the mind highway thing in Scott Pilgrim? Don’t tell me we’re going to go roller skating through someone’s weird dreamscape desert and brain hitchhike our way to Seattle.”

Terezi smiles, teeth poking out one by one. “Roller skates? Now _that_ is an excellent idea!”

You bury your head in your palms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr post for this chapter's image: [here.](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/124884447172/lets-dance-to-joy-division-and-celebrate-the)


	2. Old Man Yells At Cloud

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just kidding, ha ha, chapter updates will take a while after *this* update.

**God of Blood, Flesh, and Language**

_The Creator of All Things but Especially Romance Novels, He Who Is Into Some Weird Shit, Worst Rebound Boyfriend In the Known Universe_

* * *

You hang up the phone. You lean into Jade. 

“Alright,” you say, your lips against her ear. “We’re going to need to pull over so I can do some stuff.”

“Does it look like I can fucking pull over right now!” Jade screams. “Because it does not look like that to me! Oh my god, Karkat, we. Are. Going. To. Die!”

You won’t die. She won’t die. It’s impossible. But you’re aware she’s afraid of the approaching storm and all its sharp objects and water ready to impale and drown the shit out of you both, respectively.

Human things weren’t built for these kinds of winds, not up here in this American state. A few skyscrapers have already toppled. There’s rolls of chain link fences blocking your way. Garbage is strewn under every crumbled concrete mass. You both have to hop off her motorcycle and help shuffle things around when you come to an impassible area, and that really hurts your time limit in the race against Egbert. Also, the storm wall is filled with a voracious, ever-spinning amount of pain, and if that gets near you you’re screwed six ways to irreparable, irredeemable body horror hell.

You didn’t think he’d be this massive, this sheer force of rain and lightning and cyclones and fuck all else, ramped up on power and lust and complete idiocy. He’s destroying literally everything, but you’re not where the action’s happening. You’re trying to keep up with the calm, massive cloud tunnel at the very center. Vriska-in-John is a dark pinprick above you, still laughing away. It’s been like, ten fucking minutes, how long can she cackle for? It’s probably just because she knows you can see John's body's shoulders move and his mouth twisted in a grotesque open grin. Fuck her.

Jade managed to get you dead center under Vriska for now, only a slight breeze blowing your hair up, but that could change in an instant. You could find that a roadway is suddenly impassable, or John changes direction arbitrarily. There’s also, of course, the danger of flooding. You’re surprised it hasn’t happened yet.

“You can’t die, you dumbass, you’re immortal,” you say. “Worst case scenario is we’re trapped underwater and have to explain to some traumatized rescue rangers how we’ve survived under the ocean for two months.”

“I am not doing that! I am so claustrophobic!”

“Just pull over somewhere high up, somewhere that won’t collapse if a wave hits it.”

Jade jerks her head, her drenched hair thwapping you in the face with enough force to make you yell, and edges the motor vehicle off to the left. She decided on a parking ramp, apparently.

“Okay, rundown of the plan:” you say, trying to stay near her as her bike rumbles and jolts over broken sidewalk tile. “We don’t have to erase John from existence. I’m going to fill myself up to gain the ability to wrestle him back into submission. Seattle is essentially my grotesque fueling station. Once I’ve taken care of that, I’ll remake everything. Every yuppie startup developer, every building, every indie coffee shop, everything.”

Jade doesn’t say a word, but you can feel her sigh with relief at your words. You glance at a couple clutching each other inside a car on the lower level. You fly by them.

“But you’ve got an important job too, Jade,” you continue. “You’ve got to make sure I do those things.”

“Karkat, I really doubt you wouldn’t help!”

”I might not. Look, Jade, imagine me, at full power, but evil and doing what John’s doing but with my own funky twist on it. Here’s an example: I might possibly try to eat you. Actually, no, scratch the ‘possibly.’ I will literally want to eat you. Because I find you attractive and that’s what my primitive god brain will want to do with you. And after I partake in cannibalistic acts, you’ll still be alive, because I’ve learned that’s how mythology works. You’ll just be sitting inside my spacious ribcage, rattling around, while I go destroy the world or whatever. Make sure, at all costs, that I do *not* do that.”

Jade’s words have a tension in them you can hear over the engine. “How am I going to stop you if all you want to do is put me in your mouth?”

“Just spell it out for me. Really clearly. Be like, ‘go off on Vriska, save John, come back here, and then we can throw a party as you bring back the whole northwest coast.’ Give me a reward, or a promise or something, and I’ll do whatever you want.”

“Okay, got it. I think.”

She drives you both to the very top of the parking ramp, which is a desolate wasteland of concrete. You wonder if all the cars were blown away or if they drove into the storm, and then you realize you don’t want to think about it. She parks her bike, and you both stare diagonally up at Vriska, in the midst of a rotating moon spotlight bordered by angry gray. You’d better act soon, or the bitch will spin off into the distance and leave you two trapped in a deadly rainstorm. You get off the bike, and so does Jade.

You stand at the edge of the parking ramp, and lean over the concrete barrier. You’re going to be honest with yourself: you’re terrified. Borderline shitting your own pants. You look at Jade. She looks back.

She’s trying, really trying, to give you an encouraging smile, but it looks more or less like a smashed banana. Her hair is stuck to her face, pointed up sharply in angles that could stab you in the eye if she got close. She’s in a black evening gown that’s drenched to the nines and all the shine taken out of it by the dirt and rain. She’s undoubtedly the most gorgeous girl you’ve ever met, and that’s saying a hell of a lot since you’re a few thousand years old. You just hope future-you will love her as much as you do now.

You choose your words very carefully, but what you essentially yell out is:

_Attention worthless humans, this is your god speaking. If you can hear me, guess what, you’re fucking dead. Yup, that’s right, this is a special message direct to your corpse-y ears, from me to you. If you want to give me a hand so I can take down the motherfucker who did this to you, feel free. Oh, also, I’ll probably give you life again, so that’s a perk you get for helping a pal out. Uh. Get inside me._

You scream it so loud your throat gets hoarse. You pump it so full of demand you’d have a hard time seeing how you could resist a call to action like that. It almost puts you out for the count, and Jade catches you as you stagger to the side. You’re proud for two whole seconds that you didn’t pass straight the fuck out like a total pansy, but then your tattoos open.

You hate it when they just up and do that, it’s like, getting cut open with knives in fun little zig-zag patterns, except the knives are made of giant bees and your flesh is on fire. The pain from that stunt pushes you over the edge, and you collapse in Jade’s arms.

In your unconscious state, you get the feeling that a great wave is rushing through you, up from your legs through your pelvis through your stomach and torso. It's brilliant, perfect, like wires are shooting sheer endorphins into your bloodstream. It's unique, different, beautiful. And it takes a ridiculously shameful amount of time to realize that _you've felt this before_. Only on holidays. On your favorite days, because what's happening to you feels like a goddamn miracle is birthing itself in your own body, and it always took a hell of a lot of pre-planning to accomplish in the far flung past.

You're not sure how long you're out for, but it must be only moments. You wake up in her lap. Her hair hangs over your face.

“Karkat,” says Jade, deadpan. “This is the most metal thing you’ve ever done.”

You sit up. You’re inclined to agree.

It’s already reached you, the tangled spiderweb of blood. It just looks like a thick netting draping and hanging over the parking ramp, the waterlogged human hemofluid oozing and clotting and separating in big hunks of brown-red as it meanders towards you. It’s no surprise the whole thing is fucking ugly, a lot of this blood had to crawl under a few tons of building to get to you. It pins your clothes to your legs and chest and arms, tries to soak through the fabric and squeeze in every slit you have.

“I’ll take that as a compliment. I haven’t done this in…” you frown. “Actually, I don’t want to think about the last time I did this.”

The worst part, and you won’t ever tell Jade this, is that you learn basic things about the people who do this for you as soon as their allotted alleles get in your own blood stream to do who-knows-what. There’s Tenzin, the stockbroker, she’s an B+ type. There’s Paul, a student, he’s O+. There’s Tina, the dead cat with the pink collar who apparently didn’t get the memo that it was a humans-only party. You like Tina.

Moral ambiguities aside, it feels real good. Real, real good. The last time you felt something like this was the one time the gas station manager got freaked out about your little ‘attempting to hibernate’ spells and you woke up in a hospital with an IV shooting cool medicine into your arm. Shit’s so fucking great. It’s like getting in a hot tub inside yourself.

“Uh, how are you feeling?” laughs Jade, nervously. She eyes The Blood. “You’re not hungry, are you?”

“Ha ha, funny joke. No, I’m not hungry, I’m just real fucking scared-” you have to pause to shudder, your spine beginning to feel like butter. Like The Blood is giving you an excellent organ massage. You lick your lower lip. “-also, really regretting not stopping John. This is all my fault.”

She makes a motion like she’s going to reach out and pat you on the shoulder, then realizes your clothes are literally soaked in other people’s fluids. She just tries to look at you sympathetically. “Aw, it wasn’t your fault. You had no way of knowing he was being controlled. This was a surprise to me too!”

You might have fed her a few little white lies about what actually happened between you and Vriska. You’ll probably tell her eventually, once crushing guilt has let up on your heart.

Another wave of delectable offerings hits you as it oozes into your tattoos. You’re actually surprised this many dead people could hear you in the area, it’s enough to get you up to a good level. You’ll probably have to yell again for more later, once your voice gets all mystical and shit. It’s enough for now, but it’d be leagues better if you had their tender hearts instead of all this dead blood. 

You realize you neglected to respond to Jade. You straighten yourself up again after letting your head roll back like an idiot. Things are getting to that woozy, dreamy state of being you used to exist in, and you’re definitely going to need something to ground you and stop you from floating off into bloody disgusting la-la land.

You want to ask Jade for help, and you’re aware she speaks English. But there’s _so many_ English words to pick from, and you can’t seem to remember what the right category is. You throw a dart at the abused target of your mind and just go for it.

“Gie me ower ye hoojakapiv- nae, fit’s it- wrist. Al hav ti use it ta canny on.”

Jade gapes at you. Shit, that must have been wrong. Try another type of English. 

“Ic behéfþ to ongietean þín clæppetunge.”

Judging by how much farther Jade’s mouth opens, that wasn’t right either. You give up.

_I’d like to listen to your pulse._

You make sure your intent is clear as crystal, that the movement of her bloodstream would keep you stable and give you something to attach yourself to. It’d be better to listen to her heart, but, well, past-you fucked that one up.

“Oh, uh, sure,” she says, and holds up her wrist. You place your ear against where the skin gets supple and thin, shut your eyes, and listen. She’s nervous, one hundred and fifty beats a minute, but her constant throb is peaceful. Reminds you she’s alive, and *not* an inferior mortal, as you take in The Blood. It’s getting a bit weak, so you call out,

_More please, I’m starving._

And your words span a little further, reach the receptors of more people even though you aren’t speaking louder. Jade’s pulse goes up by eleven beats, and she shifts. You open your eyes to see a red-tinted world and Jade exposing her neck to you. She’s wincing. As tempting as it is, you’re not that desperate yet.

_Whoops, sorry. Not you, Jade, you’re excused._

Although that doesn’t stop you from leaning in to kiss her artery there, sweet under your lips. You hear her pulse even without your ear up against it. Wait, you’re getting the body seventh-sense shtick already? You didn’t realize you were that fucked up on power just yet.

She’s nice, lovely, you like her skin. You keep kissing her throat, and she lets you. “Karkat,” she says. You’d get mad at her for using that shallow name if she wasn’t Jade. “Karkat, are you ready yet? Seattle’s flooding… And you’re getting an awful lot of gunk shot into you.”

_A little more._

You use a vague term for the unit of measurement, since you’re not sure how much more you want before you’re supposed to do… something or other. The Blood is thick on you, threading into your back and sprawling out like a web. It feels so good, like if you were taking a bath in these feelings you’d never leave the damn tub.

You want Jade to feel this good too, so you grab her waist and set her gently down on the concrete, get between her spread legs. You draw your thumbs vertically down from her collarbone, between her breasts, to her waist. Fuck, the things you’d do to her… You would tear the fabric off her. You would slice down that line like a knife. Use your nails to go in hard. You would edge back the curve of her skin, peel her torso like an orange. Give her the best sort of pain, draw a satisfaction from her you haven’t had in centuries. You never played with Jade like that before.

You would dig your fingers into her, feel pools of her blood bubble up to your knuckles, sift through flesh and muscle straight to bone. Open up her sticky ribcage, her skin falling like strings of melted cheese. Push into her as far as your wrists. You love that wet noise. Grab. Rip. Eat her whole. Feed her. Make love to her. Feel the light itself as she turns to liquid smoke in your throat, so you can remake her again and again.

You tell her all that, of course. Languidly. With feeling. Erotic material this good can’t be kept to oneself.

She screams. Her bloodstream hammers. She slams her palms against her ears. Her spine jerks back and she seizes against the ground.

“Stop! Karkat, stop!” she wails. “Don’t say- don’t- You’re hurting me!”

Seriously? Fuck, it’s hard to judge what kind of strength humans have. You forgot how weak they are, like bugs. Jade’s a nice one though, like a butterfly or some shit. You’d pin her up on a wall any day of the week.

You tell her you’re sorry. She keeps screaming. Goddammit, Jade, you’re trying to do something nice here. You lean over her, press your fingertips to her heaving ribs, try to get a better look at her face. It’s hard to read her for some reason, like you can’t solidify the probably absurd facial expressions she’s performing. You’ve only got her words to go off of, her blood pounding in your ears, filled with all sorts of good emotions you laced your descriptors with.

“Karkat,” she stammers out, language woven with fear, mortification, nervousness, arousal. “Karkat, before you… before you do anything to me, I want you to do something. Okay? Two things. You didn’t forget what you were supposed to do already, did you?”

_I dunno, maybe. What is it?_

The ground shakes from your voice, pebbles clatter underneath the both of you. She shivers from the tips of her toes to the top of her head. Her eyes roll to you. “Oh gosh oh gosh oh- Y-you see Vriska? Up there?” She points. You don’t look. “Yeah, uh, there. I need you to… to take her out. Make her mortal, maybe? Just get her out of that body. And then John? You remember John? I want you to put him back in the body you just kicked Vriska out of, okay? But make sure not to kill him or erase him from existence or anything! Do you understand?”

You laugh. Ha ha, funny joke Jade, like you could choose *not* to understand. 

“I, uh, I’ll take that as a yes, I guess? Um, okay, and then come back to me, and then… then you can do whatever you want to me. Whatever you want.” She sighs, and it’s not a word, so you can’t tell what kind of sigh it is. “And then, after that, you’ll do one more, really important thing. But just focus on the now. Can you stop John and Vriska? For me?”

_For you, anything._

She arches to you, heaving, squirming, clutching your biceps, feeling your devotion, every type of love you put into your words. Shit’s hot. You can’t help but grin.

You’re not *quite* strong enough for the whole by-your-word-it-is-so thing, irregardless of whether the recipient could hear you, because then you could just say _Everybody back to normal, party’s over_ and the party would be over. But you’re getting there. Slowly. You wish everybody else would just up and die for you already, you can’t fucking wait to be top tier and not a complete loser for the first time in millenia.

You feel another ping of offerings as new blood soaks into you. You can barely bring yourself to care about their names. Their deaths are getting less satisfying. Law of diminishing return? Whatever, you can get more later. After Jade’s task.

You slide off Jade, and stand up. You straighten your shirt, The Blood parting and reconvening as you move your arms, and look towards the sky. It is absolutely no fair you got the short end of the stick and can’t fucking fly, it’s like, the one thing outside your control. Even at your peak you could never do it, and it bothered the pants off you.

You wonder if they can hear you from up there. You test it out.

_Vriska._

you say, at a normal volume. Her real name was always fun to say, but you’d never tell her that. The stops and consonants are all lined up for heavy bedroom whispering and yelling with an idiotic accent that nobody but you would find funny. From far away, against the gray of the cloud tunnel, you see the jolt of John’s body’s shadow. You hear Vriska’s borrowed heart speed up.

Why is Vriska in that godawful, bucktoothed body, again? You made her a perfectly nice body back in the day and it is an insult to your sensibilities that she refused to stay in it. You are so ripping her out of that pale-ass corpse boy and stuffing her into that dinky short Vriska bod where she belongs.

_Alright John, first off, keep your vacuous ass in one place._

The typhoon spirals, like it’s thinking, changes direction, and slowly comes to a halt. He’s still spinning and storming, but the eye will remain near enough to Jade. You don’t want her to be crushed; you want to play with her later.

But then Vriska says, “John, make Karkat shut up! He’ll take it all away if you don’t.” She tries to whisper it so you can't hear it, but your own hearing is irrelevant at this point. She's like, a fucking half a mile in the sky, there's no way you'd be able to catch what was happening if you had normal senses. You know what words are being said because you are every spoken word that ever was and ever will be.

There’s a brief murmur, somewhere far off. You don’t catch what John’s saying to her, or how he’s doing it, and that makes you livid. He’s stealing your thunder. How dare your domains vaguely overlap each other. He’s so dead. He’s so fucking dead. You’ll gnaw his fucking face off.

“What do you mean you don’t know where he is, oh my god, just silence everything but me!” yells Vriska.

He does.

Quiet hits you like a sledgehammer to the face. The sound of the storm stops, but the breeze you still feel, pulling your hair towards Vriska. Your blood hammers in your ears. And so does Vriska’s and Jade’s and the hearts of a few stragglers. Against the silence, it sounds like someone blowing into a microphone loudly. It’s the worst noise ever. God you hate being quiet. 

You say her name again. Nothing comes out.

Not like this will do shit in the long run, it just makes everything more challenging. You are so creaming John. You’re going to get up there and pummel his stupid clouds into submission. Hopefully by that time you’ll have gotten enough out of your offerings to do that.

You get The Blood to make a path for you. It trips over itself to weave together, dripping and clotting in thick columns to support you all the way down to the battered ground. You step off the parking lot and onto the steep ramp, and begin to climb as The Blood melds and collapses before you.

Your dress shirt’s a bit tight now, even though you got it two sizes too big when you were a stick-thin pushover. You unbutton your shirt so the parts of The Blood beelining it for your torso can seep in freely. For some reason, you can’t bring yourself to take it all the way off or remove these hideous dress pants. Morals, scruples, and the modern societal pressures about nudity hammered into your head by past-you are apparently hard to remove. Wow, past-you was sure the worst. You were only him like, ten minutes ago, how were you so terrible?

It gets cold up high, but you just regulate your temperature and you’re a fucking sauna. You wish you could change your flesh form to something massive and then just clap Vriska to death. Now *that* would be fun. But you’re not quite there yet. No one ever said you weren’t a patient god.

The Blood drips off of you like a hole-filled cape, flooding into path and columns and ground hundreds of feet below, thick and heavy and totally fucking metal. Especially coming off your newfound ‘didn’t have to work out for these’ muscles you’ve got going. You missed them. Jesus fuck, if you could get your old god outfit back, you’d look so badass right now. Why’d you throw that thing away?

Vriska is having some inane conversation with John you don’t care about like, “John, shoot thunder at him!” “Okay, then just put some clouds over him!” “What do you mean meteorology doesn’t work that way? You’re a _god!_ You get to decide!” “He’s literally a god of pain, don’t worry about it!”

You also sense words getting typed. But you’re not strong enough to pick up on what the written words contain or who’s typing yet. It’s probably not important.

Vriska’s voice is the only thing that works in the whole area, so you can hear it clear as day. John’s a fucking idiot. You could kill yourself six times over by now if you were him. Maybe. Perhaps The Blood is thick enough to protect you from any inferior tier deities.

There is one defense he’s set up, and it’s the wind tunnel around Vriska. He’s keeping her in the air, probably the one presence he’s aware of in this whole gaudy display of power. You face her down, The Blood unable to condense over the strong vacuum of wind. You’ll have to get a running start.

You leap into her, latch onto her shoulders, dig your nails into John’s body at the very eye of the storm. You hang onto her, force yourself into the wind. She tries to rip you off, pathetically, but your regained strength can beat John’s shit musician muscle tone any day of the week. You bury your face into her pulsing, throbbing neck to make sure she can feel every movement of your lips and tongue.

You say her name. It is cathedral bells against the storm. It is the sun peeking through the clouds in patches. It is the cry for help of someone getting robbed. Her name booms soundlessly around the galestorms, through the thunder, and Vriska wails. She covers her ears, shrieking in a voice not hers at all.

You will rip her apart. You will dine on a god, eat her heart and grow to more, twice the creator past-you ever was. You will eat every word she cries out, take all of her bodily suffering and make it yours and _feast_. You could recreate everything with her gift, remake it, destroy and remake and destroy and remake until you ran out of juice, like you did long ago.

Er, wait, no. That’s not what Jade wanted you to do. What did she want again? Oh yeah, to make both of these dumbasses in the sky mortal. Fine, whatever, you can do that. You think up the sentence to get her out of this body, and you begin to say it into her neck.

You discover you shouldn’t have hesitated when you realize Vriska is blurting out words. 

“-didn’t give it all up! I still have one trick left! I _will_ win this!”

She yanks you up by the collar. Her breath smells like too many Altoids. 

She kisses you.

Vriska could only ever command three of you with her various forms of mind control: you, Aradia, and Sollux half the time. Aradia always found ways to outsmart her, but you? You never did. Terezi always joked how fucking poetic it was, and as the god of language, you were inclined to agree.

The flesh is weak.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr post for this image: [here](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/125066443312/carved-your-name-across-three-countiesground-it)


	3. Your Favorite Power Metal Album

**God of the New Spaces, the Night, and the Rising and Setting Sun**

_Patron Of Discoverers, She Who Loves The Stars (Especially One Star), The Best Right Hand Pitch in the Bay Area_

* * *

You were having a wonderful time sipping herbal tea on the roof of the apartment when two obtuse figures decided to ruin the evening by shooting out of your earlobe.

After apologizing wholeheartedly to Rose’s brother for shrieking and splashing your tea in his face, they explained the situation to you and insisted you accompany them. They did not, however, explain why they were wearing roller skates. You had to accept the pair offered to you. The alternative was to accept a piggy back from Terezi, and that would have been unfortunate for everyone involved.

And so, for the first time in a long while, you go mind diving. It is tedious, hard to navigate, and beautiful. You would be very lost without Terezi’s navigation.

Dave brings up an interesting point as you speed skate through someone’s glass dreamscape city in an outfit reminiscent of science fiction films. He grabs a crystal lamppost to swing around and follow Terezi down the transparent street. He asks you, “So, uh, you gonna grab Rose for backup as we take on the power couple? I mean, don’t feel pressured or anything, but this would be one jank-ass party with all seven, uh, eight now I guess, of us dicking around and being awesome. Let her complete the ultimate super-powered team with a boatload of inner conflict. Kanaya, you have the ability to make this happen.”

Terezi transitions you into another mind, seamlessly blending into the halls of a ruined castle on the coast. “I am sorry Dave, I cannot call her. She is too far away.”

He jumps over a fallen column, and you zoom into an archway transitioning into a modern wooden cabin. Your outfit turns into three different plaids and none of them match. “Shit, really? You have limited minutes or something? That’s old hat.”

“Not exactly. It is a one way line. Rose can talk to me anytime she wishes, but I cannot reach her where she is. It would be a huge waste of energy.” You duck under a taxidermied bear head as your wheel shoes carry you forth. “And I will not squander her Christmas present for me. I do not believe she will attempt to call tonight, as we had a rather lengthy -ahem-” you attempt to cough fairly obviously. Did it work? You should probably add some air quotes. “-’conversation’ this morning.”

“Gross,” says Dave, as Terezi jumps out a window. You and Dave follow, and you come to a speeding halt in a breezy, hilly field. Grass waves against a cheery blue sky with friendly puffs of cloud hanging above. You wind up in a rather pleasant, but plain, white dress, along with Terezi. Dave is wearing a red and white baseball tee, which you find rather disjointed from the scene.

“Wow. It’s like that Windows XP background,” says Dave, looking around. “Why’d we stop, to bask in the nostalgia?”

“Oh no,” says Terezi, grinning. “We’re here! This is Jade.”

Dave raises an eyebrow. Oh, of course, you were aware Jade and Dave dated for a long while. You believe standing inside your ex-girlfriend’s head counts as an awkward moment. “Where’s all her secrets and memories and stuff?” he asks. “Not like I want to dig through them, but mine was as easy as wandering haphazardly into a hotel room and making love to the weirdos inside. Which doesn’t sound that easy in retrospect but I mean…”

You cannot hear him, because his volume gradually decreases until he is pure mumbles. Terezi answers him with, “Some people keep theirs well hidden. She might have buried some items. Who knows!”

Terezi snaps her fingers, and you are standing on top of a blah concrete slab, looking up at a massive stormcloud.

The silence is what hits you first. Pure, unyielding silence, worming into your ears and weighing down your shoulders and giving you a massive headache almost instantaneously. The second thing that hits you is Jade Harley, a girl you have talked to twice and liked both times, lying like a shipwreck underneath you.

She is a mess of fabric, once beautiful dress ripped and bunched up to her thighs, one shoe totally gone and the other hanging on by her curled up toes. Her knees are up, her hands over her eyes, her shoulders heaving as though she just ran many miles.

You try to say, ‘Jade, my dear, what happened?’ but your voice is stolen from you. Instead, you crouch down and touch her shoulder. She jolts, and untucks her head from her arms, staring up at you with pupils pencil-thin. Terezi sits down next to you, and holds out her phone, tapping the screen. Jade shakes the daze away, then reaches into her bust and pulls out her lit up smartphone. You also take out your stylish Razr.

H3LLO DO 1 H4V3 4LL TH3 CORR3CT PHON3 NUMB3RS?  
hi  
why are you guys wearing roller skates  
R34SONS  
Hello Jade It Has Been Some Time  
And The Roller Skates Are Now Thankfully Removed  
And Everyone Else Will Follow Suit After I Direct This Glare At Them

You direct a glare at them. They follow suit.

What Happened  
ummmmmmmm  
i guess  
ummm  
terezi weird question for you  
SHOOT  
did karkat ever try to sex you up while also ripping you apart and devouring you?  
4LL TH3 T1M3! 1T W4S FUN

You ungracefully stick your tongue out and scrunch up your face, and spare a glance up at Terezi, who is currently smelling her phone screen. Dave and Jade are making the exact same face as you.

anyway this is soooooo embarrassing but i kinda promised him he could do that to me because he made it sound kind of... not nice exactly but like..... something unique???  
but it hurt me and i dont want to :((((((((((  
really really dont want to :((((((((((((((((((((  
4LTHOUGH 1 QU3ST1ON YOUR T4ST3 1N TH3 B3DROOM 4RTS  
YOU W1LL NOT H4V3 TO DO 4NYTH1NG YOU DON’T W4NT TO  
W3 4R3 H3R3 TO H3LP  
thats nice i guess but why is kanaya here?  
I Am In The God Club Too  
Exclusive Member  
oh  
hmmmmm  
ohhhh my gosh youre the goddess of discovery arent you??? oh my gosh ive always wanted to meet you :)  
and ive already known you for a while? and you dated rose? wow!  
wow!!! im in awe miss goddess :o i think you are my most very favorite aspect  
Blush  
we will have to talk more later!!!  
but for now...... weve got a big problem

She points then, and the three of you follow her gaze to Karkat. You watch Dave mouth the words, ‘Jesus fuck.’

He is quite far away from you, and quite far above you. The small point of his body moving through the cloud tower is overshadowed by the great, dripping mass of Blood leading to his person. From a gargantuan, city-spanning red base, it climbs like stretched out dough, accumulating in a point and a path he can walk on. He has not done this in a long time. Well you hope he has not done this in a long time, that would be unfortunate if a mass sacrificial bloodletting happened in recent years. It probably would have been on the news.

He is en route to Vriska, who coincidentally is the only one able to talk in this stormscape. She states a string of panicked ramblings in a voice that does not belong to her. It is quite eerie, this nervous voice ringing out in the silence from far away. You feel a pang of something when you see her. What is it? Nostalgia? Oh no, wait, it is simply the bitter fact that you never got to punch her in the face for cheating on you multiple times. Sigh, missed opportunities. You look back at your mobile device when you see Terezi furiously typing.

TH4T 1D1OT! WHY 1S H3 UP TH3R3?  
TH3R3 1S NO W4Y VR1SK4 W1LL S1MPLY ROLL OV3R 4ND 4CC3PT TH1S  
I Second This Statement  
Mind Control Is Imminent  
Although Fun In Theory I Actually Hate Mind Control  
i feel bad interjecting this bechdel passing moment  
actually dave this doesnt pass weve been talking about a dude  
but how the fuck does vriska get mind control too  
i thought that was tzs thing  
1T 1S! VR1SK4 1S JUST MOR3 PHYS1C4L 4BOUT 1T  
BUT UNFORTUN4T3LY 1T 1S F41RLY SUCC3SSFUL WH3N SH3 M4N4G3S TO BLUND3R H3R W4Y THROUGH 1T  
1T 1S 34SY FOR M3 TO COMB4T BUT 1 N33D FULL 4CC3SS TO K4RK4T’S FOR3H34D TO DO SO  
WH1CH M34NS W3 W1LL N33D TO G3T UP TH3R3 1F WH4T W3 TH1NK W1LL H4PP3N H4PP3NS

You look up, watch as Karkat gets close to Vriska in John Egbert’s body. He leaps into her as Vriska shrieks, and you cannot see the actions very well but you know Karkat’s wrangling her under his grasp. The Blood drips off of him, onto him, scrambling to get its whirling column to him in the very center of the storm. Vriska says, “I can win this!”

Jade texts something, straightens out her clothing and stands up. You and the rest of the group follow. You peer at the text.

and how are we going to do that?

You do not have to look up to know Terezi is grinning at you.

Silence opens like a curtain with the voice of a nasally young man ringing through the air. It echoes as though it has no identifiable source, as though speakers are hidden in every crevice broadcasting an odd announcement at a perfect volume. The words that come forth are far less than perfect.

“Uh, Vriska, why aren’t you answering me? What are you guys doing down there? Like, there is definitely some spit in your breath and some shared air and, oh shit, yuck, you’re making out in the sky with Karkat aren’t you? In my old body!? Stop it! Stop it right now! Oh my god he’s cheating on Jade with me! Oh my god stop making this an intro to a sexy twin porn sandwich, Vriska, that’s not cool! Guh, why aren’t you answering me? What’s going onnnnnnnn?”

The sound of wind and far away destruction and the sea lapping against the pillars of the parking ramp smashes back into existence. It is like a white noise machine suddenly went out of control. Your ears ring.

Jade presses her hands to her cheeks as she watches the catastrophe above. “Oh noooooo,” she says. “Oh noooooo.”

“Seconded.” you say.

“This is a shitshow,” says Dave, taking a picture on his phone of the sloppiest makeouts you ever did see. Or sort of see, they are rather far away.

“Alright Kanaya,” Terezi says, completely unfazed. You suppose it is because she has those blinding glasses on. “You’re the only one here who can fly. You know what to do.”

“No,” you say, unable to tear your eyes away. My goodness, you are getting empathetic tongue pains. You are surprised John’s glasses have not broken in half yet. “If I bring the night now, I would lose all that Rose gifted me. It takes quite a bit of effort for me to fly! I refuse to go back to that state of being after she worked so hard.”

“Is this really the time? You’re our only hope! We can get somebody to discover something for you afterwords if you want, no matter what it takes.”

You turn to her, and give her your best motherly frown. “May I remind you how difficult it was to find a willing person after seventy years? I highly doubt I am your last hope, especially considering the speed I fly at.”

Jade raises her hand meekly, tearing her eyes away from the scene above. “Um, you just need somebody to dedicate discoveries to you, right? I might be able to do that for you. Not right now or anything, but later. I don’t really know what I’m going to do with my life yet, but… it’s for sure going to involve discoveries. All I have to do is promise-”

“No!” Terezi yells, making a ‘strike!’ sort of motion. Vriska twitches above you, clearly hearing a voice she has not heard in many thousands of years, but cannot look down because her mouth is currently occupied with a collarbone.

“Why can’t I promise Kanaya I’ll do stuff for her?”

“Because Karkat,” she points at him, thrashing in the air far away. “Is a jealous god.”

“Oh my god, this is more of that dumb worshiper stuff, isn’t it. That’s bullshit!” Jade says, folding her arms. “I don’t care if he’s jealous. I’m my own person. I don’t ‘worship’ anybody! I don’t belong to either Karkat or Kanaya!”

Terezi pokes her hard in the chest, acrylic nail-first. “Wrong! He took all you are, heartless girl. He will take the rest out of spite if you try to give it to someone else.”

“He won’t do that,” says Jade, her face flushing from anger. Judging by that shade of red, she has been hanging out with Karkat for too long. “He’s an asshole but he’s not _that_ kind of asshole.”

“Still wrong. Still very, very wrong.”

“Maybe he’s changed!”

Terezi shrugs. “Maybe, indeed. But the possibility he’ll roll over and accept you’re now a devious, polytheistic pagan is far less likely when he’s out of his mind like this!”

“I don’t care! It’s stupid you’re going to make Kanaya do something that might make her starve.” yells Jade. She turns to you, folds her arms, and with the poutiest lips in the history of space time says, “Kanaya, I promise I will give you all sorts of discoveries in the near future. Whatever you’d like! As long as you help us get out of this mess. I am your personal explorer!”

A wave of warmth hits the back of your head, and you let it roll down your spine and carry itself to your ribs. It is far less intense than Rose’s dedication, but it feels pleasurable nonetheless. More out of old habit than anything else, you reach out and pluck Jade’s hand from her side. You give it a squeeze with both of your own, then lift it, and give her knuckles a brief kiss.

“Well, my dear, I will hold you to it,” you say, smiling and hoping your lipstick did not smudge.

Jade gives you a curious half-grin, squeezes your hand back, and says, “Of course.”

“Fine! No one listen to me!” says Terezi, throwing her arms up in the air. “It’s fine! Just ignore the god with the power of educated foresight! Dave, for petes sakes, stop taking pictures and back me up.”

Dave snaps his head back to Terezi, a pained look on his face. “TZ, this is a once in a lifetime opportunity and I am not letting it slip.”

“I see your point, and you are correct! Blackmail well, my knight,” she says. “Now that we have the current conundrum dubiously solved, Kanaya, will you please take us up?”

You quirk an eyebrow up high. “You… do remember the speed I fly at, correct? It is the speed of sunset. Which means it will take us at least twenty minutes to reach our pair. Who knows if Vriska decides to do something about us at that point. Or, even worse, who knows what state of undress they will be in at that point.”

“Again, no other option, I say we start now and-”

“Um, sorry to interrupt, but-” Jade says, pointing at her motorized bike. “Will that work?”

You wind up puzzling yourselves to fit on top of it. Jade is driving, her hands poised around the throttle and revving the engine. Dave sits in the passengers seat with Terezi on his lap, hands holding her waist and shakily fumbling Jade’s illegal Uzi. Terezi is grinning with all her freakish teeth, loading another one of Jade’s many guns. This one is a pistol. You are not sure how comfortable you feel giving the blinded Terezi a gun.

You stand behind the bike, and pull your night cloak from your purse. You hook it around yourself like the stylish cape it is.

“And the plan for the road:” Terezi says, watching you prepare. “I need to get close enough to touch Karkat’s forehead. After that, I will take a quick detour to remove Vriska’s influence. He and I will remain frozen as long as I am delving into his mind. The rest of you, get Vriska away from him.”

“Got it,” Jade says, somewhat annoyed. You wonder if there is a developing rivalry between her and Terezi. You hope not, you think they would make good friends.

You spread your arms out, your black cloak flowing in the breeze. You close your eyes, and think of the stars, think of the moon, think of Rose. It has been a very, very long time since you have brought the night, and although the stakes are high you cannot help but feel pleased.

You feel them settle at the bottom of your cape, hundreds of millions of glimmering lights, ready to be scattered along by your wingspan. You draw the hood over your eyes a bit, just for the ambiance, and hop onto the motorcycle. You perch on one of Jade’s saddlebags, uninhibited by seating space or the lack of something to hang onto. After all, you cannot be separated from your true being.

You let the bottom of your night drop from the lower seams of your cloak, wisping black over the surface of the parking ramp. It catches in the wheels of Jade’s bike, and waits for them to spin. You give the signal to her by reaching around Dave and Terezi and tapping her on the shoulder, tiny glitter stars falling off your black arms, lingering in the air. She pulls the throttle, and the wheels turn. It tickles.

Jade does not mess around, she flies it off the roof of the ramp, and you allow her and Dave to scream for a millisecond of freefall before you let your night grow.

It absorbs itself in the wheels, does a loop-de-loop before spreading behind the bike like the water trail of a boat. It leaves stars and blue-black in its wake, wholesome things, not like this far away night the world dreamed up for itself in your absence. These stars are literal balls of light, shimmering lights you could reach out and grab and rearrange if you so desired.

You smell your delicious night air override the storm winds where the trail lays itself. Your cloak paints black over the sky, there to stay until you decide it is time for sunrise. It fans out as you drive farther away, placing twinkling orbs of light much closer to the ground than you ever have placed them before.

Jade does not start heading up immediately, preferring instead to giggle like a child and look behind her at the trail of stars you leave permanently hanging in the sky. It covers up the flooded city, your beloved night, and you appreciate that your new explorer appreciates it almost as much as you do.

Dave speaks up first, shakily, as Jade drives you all up towards a slightly disrobed Vriska and Karkat. “Kanaya, you do realize that we look like the cover of a heavy metal album right now? You also realize that this is, hands down, the coolest thing I’ll ever do in my life, right?”

“Yes,” you say.

Jade does not mess around for long, and you head towards the top of the storm, the air getting colder as you climb. Vriska, terrible, horrible Vriska whom you want to punch in the face, finally unlatches herself from Karkat as you draw near. He slumps into her shoulder, completely under her will.

“H-hey, Kanaya!” she stutters, trying to button John’s clothing back up, yelling over the roar of Jade’s engine. You can tell she is having a very hard time with this. You suppose she must not have that much power left, if she insisted on spending so much time seducing Karkat. “I never got to honestly apologize for cheating on you with that other girl! And that guy! And those two other girls! And the harem of six men! Okay, I’m honestly not sorry for that one, but I _did_ invite you. I mean, I would have said sorry, if _someone_ didn’t kill me.”

She tries to glare at Terezi as Jade pulls up next to them, but John’s face is not made for ill looks. Jade idles her bike so that Terezi is able to reach out and touch Karkat’s very zoned out face when she deems the time is right.

“Vriska,” you say, looking down, pretending to be shy. Terezi makes a movement out of the corner of your eye, ready to spring. As over-dramatically as you can, you say, “When we are done with this nonsense, I… will… never forgive you!”

Terezi lashes out, smacks her palm against Karkat’s forehead, and a burst of energy hurls Jade’s bike back, spinning uncontrollably. The feeling of falling wells within you and you reach for Dave and Terezi to keep them on the night cycle. Jade hangs on, powers through the flips, and you manage to get enough of a grasp of your sky to control the turn.

“Shit!” Terezi yells, as you stabilize everything, albeit further away from the pair. “Drive around again, he won’t let me in!”

Jade does as told, cranking her bike up to lip flapping speeds and attempting to get in position again. Vriska looks appalled that you attempted a sneak attack.

“Sic ‘em, Karkat!” she yells. “Or you don’t get to buttfuck John!”

“Bro, no.” whispers Dave.

Although you are dizzy from the speed of approach, you can see Karkat snap his head up like a puppet getting tugged to action. His eyes are red and his horns are full and you are not sure how you can stop him as he opens his mouth to word your doom.

Terezi raises her pistol. Dave raises his arms, aims the Uzi in the same way. Terezi pulls the trigger. Dave pulls the trigger.

One of them shoots Karkat’s jaw off.

Your eardrums have a panic attack. Dave makes a garbled string of incoherent noises which you are inclined to agree with. Vriska shrieks as a few teeth hit her in the face. You are not sure how Terezi did that while blind, but it is quite gross. You think she actually _wanted_ a messy headshot, because she is cackling as you zoom towards the gore.

Karkat begins to repair his jaw, The Blood helping him reconstruct tongue and lips and skin without having to pull back his original parts. Jade does not risk idling this time, she simply slows down the bike as you trail your night towards Karkat.

Terezi does not reach for Karkat as he comes into range. Instead, and with one swift motion, she grabs Jade’s wrist, ignores her scream as she yanks the palm off the handlebars, and presses it to Karkat’s forehead. He freezes immediately, his ever-smoking red eyes unblinking as though they were dipped in wax, his arm permanently latched around Vriska’s waist, The Blood heading into his half repaired cheek tangled forever into his face.

It worked.

But as the bike begins to drop suddenly, you realize you are left without a driver. Terezi and Jade stay stuck midair, Jade’s face frozen in an angry yell and her arm extended towards Karkat, Terezi teal eyed and grimacing and holding Jade’s wrist like a dagger she is plunging into Karkat’s head. Dave shrieks and lunges for the handlebars.

As you fall, as Dave attempts to desperately regain control of a machine you have no doubt he is clueless about, you hear a trapped Vriska yell,

“This is absolutely fucking ridiculous!”

And you most definitely agree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr post for this image: [here](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/126482813012/got-a-little-soulthe-world-is-a-cold-cold-place).


	4. Gorn (Making Memories)

**God of Mind, Justice, and the Senses**

_Patron of Judges and the Judged, She Who Has A Weird Tanline, City of Austin Police Force Employee of the Month of April_

* * *

Karkat always gave you 20/20 vision in his mind past a certain point in your relationship. It was annoying, and you’re relieved to note it did not ever stop being tooth-pullingly annoying. You don’t even get a blindfold. You sure wish you had one once you get a peek at the setting.

You're in a lobby that smells like an antique store. It's outdated and not even charmingly outdated-- The whole thing has this terrible dark-green-brown color scheme that looks like a pool table. You're wearing an outfit to match: a pantsuit in a not-tasty chocolate brown with a floofy green top and ascot you remember from 1900s Americana. It’s good to know that Karkat still has a terrible innate fashion sense, and is so far behind the times it’s hilarious.

There's nobody at the big oak reception desk, but the green tinted lamp with one of those ancient orange carbon filament lightbulbs is flicked on. Karkat must have been prepared for you. Or, more likely, he was prepared for Jade Harley.

She’s there with you in a Gibson girl hobble dress, hair done up high and making noises like “Huah? Huh? Wha?” as she turns her head back and forth. You keep a very firm grip on her wrist.

“I’ll make this summary quick and easy!” you say, giving her a glare. One disadvantage of your real life blinder glasses is the inability to glower at people with your spooky teal irises. “We are currently in a metaphorical representation of Karkat’s head. He wouldn’t let me in, so I used you as a key to unlock him so we can edit and change his very soul. Which we will have to do to find Vriska’s influence.”

Jade blinks at you, then starts subconsciously picking at her hair pins. She pulls one out, long and sharp and intricate, and a quarter of her hair falls down. “Okay? I guess that makes sense, sort of. I’d ask for some more info but shouldn’t we hurry?” 

You watch her throw the pin on the floor, then pluck another one out. She’s taking this ‘inside of Karkat’ shtick surprisingly well for a mortal. You say, “Yes, but there’s no real need to sloppily whip through. Karkat cannot do any damage while we’re digging through him, and John appears to be stuck in place.”

She attempts to take out another pin with a butterfly on top and can’t reach it. She tries to remove her arm from your grip, but you hold firm. “Ah, not so fast,” you say, pulling her back. “If you let go, then I get purged from his brain! You’re the reason I’m here; the key that unlocks his very soul!”

“Oh. I won’t let go then,” she says, plainly. You didn’t expect anything less, you find her simple. “Could you, um, get this then? It’s done up really tight and it’s pretty uncomfortable!”

She bends over to your height, pointing to her hair. You grab the remaining two pins and pull them out fast and hard, then toss them to the floor. Jade winces as she straightens up again. You grin and say, “Let’s hold hands!”

“You didn’t have to be so mean about it!” she says, letting you slide your hand down to lace your fingers with hers. “Do you have something against me? Do you think I’m stupid? Or are you just a huge butt? I don’t get it.”

“Jade Harley, I am the largest butt!” you cackle. You tug her towards the plain oak double doors. “Other butts know not what they compete against.”

“No, that’s a terrible answ-” She takes a few steps, then stumbles. “Ugh, what is with this dress!? I can’t even walk in it!”

She stops to flatten the fabric by spreading her legs as far as allowed in the hobble skirt, then rips one side up to her mid-thigh with her hand. As she does so, she says, “You might be a butt but you have to hate me for a reason! And it better not be because you’re bitter or jealous over some boys, because that would be super dumb. So, why?”

“I simply have no patience for naivety,” you say, deciding to tell the truth. “And Jade, you have it in spades! Spades! It’s one of my least favorite traits in a human. Innocence is so overrated. Oh, and will you be a dear and open the door? I probably won’t be able to.”

She marches to the door, as far as your arm span allows for. She turns the crystal knob. “You don’t know me at all, buttface. You can’t say that!”

You let the pointless conversation drop as the hinges creak and swing open. You’re excited to see what’s changed since you’ve last been here. He’s redecorated a few times throughout the years, but he’s never managed to edit the very core of him. As soon as you see inside, you know that still rings true.

Karkat is a library.

He is humongous. He is old-fashioned. He is shelves upon shelves upon shelves of meticulously organized, ill-kept books with crumpled bindings and worn off labels. He is tall ceilings and ugly brown paint. He is a reading hall filled with musty oak tables. He is intricate gaslit lamps dangling from the ceiling. He is wooden staircases with tacky carpet that creak and shake as you step down them. He is rain pattering against the windows, water gently dripping down the other side of the thick glass.

He's alarmingly cozy, an in-your-face sort of mysterious, and smells like mold and old book. Jade sighs like she just fell in love. You certainly see the appeal of the _contents_ of the library, but you don’t see the draw of the setting. To each their own, you suppose.

You lead Jade down the staircase from the lobby area into the main floor of the library, brushing your hand along the old railing as you go. It's not dusty, which you didn't expect. You thought he'd have the cobwebs and other dirt to match the vintage look he's got going on. He cleaned himself up a bit! How cute.

Every shelf has a sliding ladder on it. He’s grown since you’ve last been here, which is to be expected. “We’re looking for Vriska’s influence so we can remove it.” you say, as you tug Jade between the tall aisles. “It will be an obvious physical object. She usually tries to blend in somewhere, but utterly fails at it!”

“Um, okay?” says Jade. You don’t look back at her, as you’re leading her down the aisles. “What’s in all these books?”

You look back to throw one of your grins at her, then say, “Why don’t I show you?”

You step into the aisle kiddie-corner from you, which has a paper label in a lead frame that says "NONFICTION TER-TEU." You stroll between the two shelves, and find his memories of you. You have a big area staked out here, but it’s nothing compared to your novels in the fiction section. That boy certainly had some creative fantasies.

“Here’s me!” you say, pointing at your shelf. You scan the books. While most of the labels are worn away, you still sense the contents. They are about you, after all. You pluck a good one from the shelf. “This book contains the myth about why we have horns. I warn you, it’s stupid.”

“I always wondered why you guys had those,” says Jade. She takes the thin paperback into her hand, then awkwardly flips it open between the two of you. You hold the other edge. “I’d like to read it a little bit, if we’ve got time.”

You forgot your written language. You scan the zig zags and dots on stained pages as Jade says, “Terezi, this book isn’t in English. I can’t read th-”

The words turn to meaning as your eyes flick through the lines. You see plot, diction, grammar, the POV, and you are very suddenly immersed in a good book.

“We need something that screams fertility,” you find yourself saying. “Like big huge dicks. What’s the most phallic object you can think of. Quick! Karkat! You’re up to bat.”

It’s you, Karkat, and Aradia, in a nondescript underground hallway. It was one of Sollux and Aradia’s necropolis pathways in their terrifying post-mortum maze. The reason you were all in there, you recall, is because there was a wicked corpse party at the center of it for the lucky souls who made it through. Aradia always threw the best parties! She jolts her head side-to-side, her empty ram skull rattling like a snake upon her shoulders.

Jade is still holding your hand, tense and unable to fit into any character in the scene. You can’t see her as your memory persona is blindfolded, but you are aware she is probably gaping at Aradia. Complete nudity and a skeletal animal cranium certainly tends to draw the eye. Either that, or she’s gaping at Karkat, who was probably a billion times more attractive when you were married to him. Sucks to miss out on that fine piece of ass, Jade.

“Sure, designate the god of blundering language to think of something shitty and symbolic. Why is it me? Why the fuck is it me?” says Karkat, not in English. “If you want something that screams sexy why not petition Vriska?”

“Vriska will _actually_ select big huge dicks as our common symbol of choice,” you say, following your line. “And big dicks does not a good myth make, as we’ve all learned from a specific incident I do not need to mention.”

Aradia rattles in agreement, her skull clicking all the way to the side.

“Whoa,” says Jade, her voice tasting of delicious horror. “She’s so freaky. Who is that?”

You choose to continue with the memory instead of breaking it to reply. Responding to Jade would pull you out of the book/narrative. Karkat’s memories are difficult to edit, but easy to disengage from. The opposite of Dave, interestingly!

You feel air move in the deadened hallway. Aradia is pointing at her head. 

Karkat groans. “While your curved horns are good for headbutting your enemies into an explosive cacophony of blood, I really don’t think they’d suit the rest of us plebs. Also, what does that say about us, we’ve all got divine corkscrew dicks? Yeah, no, I resent that implication.”

“Don’t be like that!” you say, elbowing Karkat in the ribs. “Let’s all have different types of horns to symbolize our sexual prowess. Mine can be large and deadly, and yours can be short and stumpy!”

Karkat sputters and you laugh with both your selves. You hear Jade giggle as well. Aradia performs her very favorite jolting rattle, where she turns her skull around 180 degrees to signify something is funny to her.

Karkat’s speech comes out like a wince. “Aradia, for the love of fuck, stop doing that. You’re freaking me out.”

“That’s enough,” you say. And you’re back in the library with Jade, staring at the book. You immediately close it, because if you don’t, Bad Things will happen. “And that’s a memory! Aren’t they just barrels full of fun?”

She shuffles around to you, curious, as you place the book back in its slot. “Yeah, actually! That was all pretty interesting, I liked seeing that other god. Karkat never really talks about her. Karkat doesn’t talk about the past all that much actually, except to make weird comparisons so he can complain about himself… If we had more time here I’d like to see lots more of these books.”

You laugh, leading her down the hallway once more. “I don’t think Karkat would appreciate that, but who cares! You’re not here for gossip, you’re here for depreciated historical knowledge! Which is a far more respectable pursuit.”

Jade might possess one of your least favorite human traits, but she is also in possession of one of your _most_ favorite too! It’s an earnest desire for knowledge and facts. It might even be enough to balance all that disgusting naivety out.

You keep the exploratory pattern structured, and Jade is happy to follow you between shelves and study rooms. There are interesting titles to look at, as well as some unique library-related locations. Karkat even has what looks to be a 1950’s hot chocolate machine next to some cushy chairs. Jade makes a noise like, “D’awww!” when you both spy it.

You are making good time as you reach the far end of the library. There’s one more aisle to go in the nonficition section. It’s smashed in the corner near a window, rain pitterpattering against the glass and obscuring the gray matter outside. The aisle is labeled []. Interesting! Very interesting! Jade comments on it in a similar manner.

You peer down the dimly lit aisle, the old lamp flickering on and off above you. There's only one book on either of the two massive shelves which make up the row. It's lying flat on a shelf perfectly within your reach, directly in the middle of the row. And at the end of the aisle-

“There she is,” you say, spotting the poster plastered on the peeling wallpaper.

It’s five feet by eight feet, taking up the entire span of the wall. It features a picture of Vriska in pinstripe Christmas lingerie, lit with a fireplace glow, reading _All Quiet on the Western Front_ in the sexiest way imaginable. It says READ A 8OOK at the bottom.

“Oh my god,” Jade says.

“Couldn’t think of a better way to describe it,” you reply. Jade leads you over to it, and begins to tug it off from the side. You help, getting it off the wall and rolling it up.

“And we are clear!” you say, securing the poster under your armpit. “Ready to get out of here? Karkat’s got a tricky exit!”

Jade looks around the shadowy, empty shelves. Her eyes fall on the suspiciously lonely book. She licks her lips. “I guess.”

You also stare at the book. It looks so delectable, just waiting for you to pick up and digest and get all the hot gossip about Karkat… And the section is labeled “[],” and it’s _completely_ empty otherwise, _and_ there’s a flickering lamp above you? It’s almost too mysteriously spooky to be true. This is like the start of a poorly plotted urban legend. You’ve got to know what’s in this thing. You’ll probably never get another chance to do it.

“Dammit,” you say. “You’ve found my one weakness. Rooting through people’s heads.”

Jade giggles. It rots your teeth. She grabs the book in question. “I’m so glad! I mean, we should probably get out of here, and save the world, but… Just a quick flip through…”

“Of course. We are discreet gentlewomen. And also fast readers!”

She holds it between you. It’s a small, red leather paperback with water damage on the cover. Untitled. You both take an end and flip it open. The pages are blank. You will your eyes to stare at the paper. Perhaps if you stare at it long enough…

… you’ll be transported into a memory.

“Uh,” says Jade.

“Hmm!” you say.

It’s not one you were a part of. Although you almost wish you were, because you love the color! Everything is so red, red, RED and it takes all you have not to bellyflop into this delicious looking ocean and swim off into the distance. Oooh, and the sky matches the sludge-y water too! Even the flat mud you’re standing on is a shade of red, although it’s more brown than anything. Some shade around the color of your skin. 

An infinite horizon of red, with an infinite ocean and infinite sky. This place is so primordial and abstract it’s either a fantasy or a dream he had. It is impossible for something like this to exist on the mortal plane. Although, ‘beyond this mortal plane’ gives you a thought…

“Oh, I get it!” says Jade, excitedly. “This is the beginning of _everything_ , isn’t it? That’s why there aren’t words in the book! Because language wasn’t a thing yet.”

“Most likely! Karkat did, and I quote, ‘claw himself out of material chaos,’ so this fits along with our myth nicely.”

And the star of this tale is right at your feet, in fact! Although he’s not quite put together yet. He’s half-made, in true mythological fashion, out of the muddy red ground. The red sun in the red sky dried his skin-pieces somewhat solid, clotting to form a nice chunky mix of Karkat.

The hollow Karkat lay on the shore, his head turned to the side, dark hair merged with the shadows on the ground. His chest cavity is open, broken, and where organs and ribs and spine should be exists only a nice view of the rippling red waves of the ocean tide. His back, the barely-made scraps of it, is arched, like he’s seizing. His one shoulder is braced against the ground, a dangling elbow pushes him back.

His mouth and eyes are things not fully formed, like broken holes in a piece of pottery. They're almost in the right shape, but his sockets are jagged and raw and open directly into his head. His insides aren't brains or guts-- it’s as though you're viewing the interior of a clay jar. Neon red liquid sloshes out of the holes in his head and chest and arms as he undulates, trying to shape himself into something real.

He hasn’t got the two-arms-humanoid thing figured out, so he’s forming too many fingertips and hands which drip upwards out of the ground. Half of them die before they see the light of day, but a few of them start forming wrists and helping the cause. They pick up dried pieces of him, grow off of him like mushrooms, snap chunks of skin-clay into place with palm lines cut too deep. 

“This is so cool!” says Jade. She crouches to pick up a piece, tugging you down by your clasped hands. “Let’s help put him together!”

She’s vibrating with excitement! That’s unexpected, you thought she would be grossed out or unnerved. You can’t help but cackle at her. “Harley human, I’ve pegged you all wrong. I assumed you were a shallow creature with some unimportant secrets to hide, but here I find my first impressions were inaccurate! Forgive my insolence.”

She laughs, placing a piece of Karkat’s forearm into his frame like a bracer. “You’re forgiven. Only because you’re a god of knowledge of something like that so you’re probably pretty good at Karkat puzzles.”

You crouch down with her and pick up a piece. Small, wet, feels like you sliced clay clean with a knife. You angle it against a hole in his neck. It doesn’t fit the way you like, so you lick it to smooth an edge down before snapping it in. Tastes like him. “I am a dark mistress of puzzles, solver of what cannot be solved. And you, Jade, are my wise puzzle cracking champion, with deft fingers that can place pieces into even the smallest holes.” You watch her do as such, reaching across you to pap something round into the torso. 

“I’m reconsidering our cooperation levels,” you continue, smoothing her piece out. Red stuff gets all over your fingers. It's silky and velveteen, and feels luscious. “We might make an excellent team. Too bad you’re already the stamped property of not one, but two of my cohorts, otherwise I’d gladly have you as my warrior. Although, I have the next best scenario! Let’s dump our boyfriends and date each other.”

Jade giggles as she plugs a chunk of thigh in. A half-formed hand snaps out and grabs her wrist as tight as it can. She ignores it. “Oh my gosh, yes! Dave will be _mortified_.”

You shake out a piece dripping birthing goop all over your fingers. “He will! He will be forced to hit on Karkat out of sheer emotional instability.”

Jade proceeds to sculpt some loose skin-clay into a sunglasses shape, and holds it up to her face. When she begins to talk in her high pitched deadpan impression, you basically die of laughter right there and then.

“Hey, sup, bro. Dude. Listen. I have… an idea. So like, our ex-girlfriends are kissing now, right, bro? Dude? So like, hear me out bro. Bro. Because our ex-girlfriends are touching lips… we should… touch lips. I mean it, dude. Dude, c’mon.”

“Dave, you succulent tit,” you say, talking out of the back of your throat like you have some kind of tumor in there. “I fucked the ass that fucked you, and you fucked the ass that fucked me so now we *have* to fuck each other to complete this ass fucking ouroboros as per the golden rules of romance which I just made up right now.” 

Jade snorts, heaving out a, “Yes, oh gosh, that’s perfect.”

“Jade Harley,” you cackle. “You are brilliant.”

“Thanks!” she says. She stares at the skinglasses, and her face grows into a devilish grin. “I am _so_ sculpting his dick out of this.”

“You’ve earned it, missy.”

You both continue to shape him into being. Your and Jade’s fingers, and Karkat’s many sloppily made ones, leave lines and dots carved into his supple flesh as you put him together. “We should sign our names,” suggests Jade. “Property of Jade and Terezi.”

And while you wholeheartedly agree with her suggestion, neither of you can break away your doodling from his tattoo pattern. Any attempts to write “Terezi was here” or draw a dick is immediately replaced with deep jagged lines. You were wondering how editable this memory was… You suppose even a blank book has its limits. Although it’s odd you were even able to deviate from the set narrative in the first place. Karkat’s thoughts usually aren’t malleable like this.

“Sit up, silly,” says Jade, gently tapping the hollow Karkat on the shoulder. Her fingers sink in to make a big ribbon-shaped mark. “Let me do your back.”

You’re surprised it works. He actually sits up. There’s something extremely unnerving about that, how Jade was able to command him without input from the book. You don’t feel so excited anymore. 

He’d be looking right at you if he had eyes. Instead you just see broken holes, birth water trickling from the edges. You feel uncomfortable. Jade starts to hum, pleasantly.

You watch the hollow Karkat try to form a mouth. He slips his fingers into the hole in his face to get neon red moisture and sculpt lips, teeth, a tongue. “Jade, it’s been too long. I think at the speed we’ve been reading… three minutes? Just in this book. That’s long. We have to stop reading.” you say. Your heart hammers in your ears. He sets his hands down. A melting tongue flicks out to wet his bottom lip. “Let’s close the book and-”

He says your name.

Ah, yes, _now_ you remember where your past-self was at this point in the myth. He made you. You were his very first, whom he called out of the dark because he used to love you so much. Because he thought you needed him so very much. Although it took him a few tries to get you right. And then you remember why you _forgot_ in the first place, and it wasn’t because you were too stupid to form memories at the moment. It’s because it was traumatic.

It isn’t any more fun the second time around. It might, possibly, be a thousand times worse, and that’s a scientific fact.

You are pulled screaming from the darkness, bones wrenched from emptiness and assembled from the hollow Karkat’s _idea_ of solidity, which is basically nothing. You are forced into a half-baked version of yourself, a twisted mind of pain and body and poor understanding of anatomy. You can’t exist like this, can’t stay in this form, so you break in two.

And you become conscious of yourself reading the nonexistent words on the page of a blank book, reading about how your blood stops and your atoms split apart and you are made into nothing and everything because of how unbearable his voice is to you. You read how you are woven into the fabric of the beginning of the universe. You read about how you split apart at the very core. 

At least this time you have the choice to stop participating. Mostly because your eyes are filling up with tears and you can’t “read” any longer. Either way, you are faced with blurry blank pages as your mind-knees tremble, pulled away from your very weird rebirth. You’re safe. 

But, you realize, as your eyes clear, that Jade has long since looked away from the book. She probably read about what happened to you too, probably felt that as well. And when one stops reading a memory, without putting it away, it tends to grow and grow until it’s something beyond your control. Bad Things happen with unchecked thoughts.

It’s no one’s fault that you let go of each other. Reactions like this are something that tends to happen when you’re shocked. Although you do blame Jade for dropping the book —open— on the ground, which caused a character you didn’t ever want to see outside of a novel appear outside of the fucking novel. The hollow Karkat stands and melts over the pages of it, lurching and leaking and horrible too close for comfort. Red flows from his ears and mouth and nostrils, and it drips into the wood with short sizzles. He reaches for you. Or perhaps Jade. One of you screams. Tries to run.

And that’s why you drop each others hands.

There’s a flash of black. You’re sucked out of his head nigh instantaneously. The comforting dark of your blinder glasses slams into your forehead like a pillow. There’s lots of wind. Noise. You’re quite damp. Your hand unlatches from Jade’s empty body automatically. And you get the sense of falling and- oh, shit, you’re in the air, aren’t you.

Karkat, normal, slightly more pleasant, de-Vriska’d Karkat, actually tries to catch you. Not with his hands (which he uses to grab Jade), or with his voice from a jaw half-repaired, but with The Blood. Unfortunately, he’s as unprepared as you are, and only semi-solid strings of Blood latch around your wrists. They pull on you like short bungee cords, getting thinner as you sink down lower.

Vriska is the one that comes to your rescue. She drops to her knees on the barely-there solid platform of Blood, using everything John had in him to attempt to tug you up. The Blood around your arms evaporates.

“Oh no-no-no-no-no-no-no-NO you don’t, I have a score to settle with you!” She clings to your arms, gripping you, trying to tediously hang on as your body blows away.

But John is weak, and she can’t hold you. Your fingers slip around his thin wrists. You don’t have much time.

“Karkat!” you yell over the storm. “Karkat! Let me back in, I need to get Jade! You kept her in there, you asshole, she’s trapped!”

He’s not listening to you. Over the edges of your glasses you see him with eyes only for Jade’s soulless heap of a body. He holds her limp by the waist, staring at her exposed collarbone like it’s a math problem he can’t solve. His jaw isn’t fully fixed yet, otherwise you know he’d be trying to order her to come back.

Vriska makes a noise like she’s dying from constipation. Your palms slip into hers in a brief freefall. Last option.

“Dave!” you scream. “Dave, where are you!”

You hear a noise which might as well be the chorus of a thousand angels come to greet you in deity heaven. An engine. Thank the Lord, Jade _did_ give Dave basic motorcycling lessons. You trust him more than you care to admit. Vriska’s fingers slip between yours and you fall, but you aren’t frightened.

Kanaya catches you tens of yards down, and rebounds you in a giant hand formed from her starry night. Like some sort of glittery appendage sidecar. 

“You know when you say my name, I’ll come charging in on my ex-girlfriend’s motorcycle powered off my dead sister’s living room!” he yells. He salutes you, backwards, without turning his head. “I’m your knight, babe!”

“Dave,” you yell over the cacophony of noise, as he attempts to drive you around and back up to Karkat. “I’d like to take this moment to thank you for not having the ability to become a primitive horrorterror version of yourself and wreak havoc on everything!”

“I love you too!” he screams back.

“Wow, okay! That’s nice to know that you’re one of those losers who falls in love with somebody after a month! I’m going to fuck those sappy feelings right out of you tonight!”

“Shit yeah, break out the coconut ropes, strap-ons, and blindfolds!”

“You realize I am still here, right?” says Kanaya, perched on a saddlebag.

You and Dave, at the same time, both turn to her and yell, “Why, you want in?”

You air high-five Dave. Kanaya buries her face in her hands.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr post for this image: [here](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/128975908862/i-know-how-the-stones-can-flyhad-some-hard).


	5. A Very Vriska Chapter

**Vriska**

_Patron of B-Movie Softcore Porn Fashion Designers, She Who Eternally Stumbles Drunkenly Into Femme Fatale Tropes, Former God of Push Up Bras_

* * *

Terezi did The Thing again. You hate The Thing, where she somehow makes the object of your affections immune to your charms for a while. She’s the largest butthole you’ve ever known.

That still doesn’t stop you from being like, a _little_ panicked when she falls. Totally not actually panicked, no way. You definitely don’t scream her name when she slips from John’s shitty piano playing arms. And you absolutely don’t sigh in relief when her posse picks her up on their flying wizard bicycle. Nope, not one bit.

You glance up at Karkat, who is looking down at you like a villain on the poster of one of John’s movies. You can see his teeth through the hole in his cheek, which quickly gets sewn up in a flash of Blood. He hefts Jade under his waist, so she’s dangling like a bent-in-half doll under those ripped arms. You’re about to say something about how it’s not fair that he gets the sexy body and you’re stuck in John Egbert, but then you see his eyes. That neon red always freaked you out, and that was _without_ the angry death stare.

“So, uh,” you say, trying to emulate that charming John-laugh that always got to you. “What are the chances you still want to stick it in my ass?”

He says something that essentially means: _Abysmal._

You actually feel the exact probability of any ass-fucking between you, with all the weird math he throws into that sentence. It’s ineffably low. Scientific notation can’t even represent how many 0s are on that percentage. You do the only thing you can do. Go straight for his fly. “Uh, I always was a gambling man? And I’m on my knees already, all you have to do is-”

Before John’s dexterous musician fingers can even think about playing your favorite cylindrical instrument, Karkat latches his hand onto your own wrist and yanks you up so you’re teetering on the way edge of the tiniest platform in existence. John’s weird organ shoe heels are hanging off the edge, and the only thing stopping you from plunging eight million feet into the drowned city is Karkat’s death grip on you. Although John would save you if you fell. Right? Right????????

Okay, so… maybe your plan for world domination wasn’t _exactly_ foolproof. Not your fault Karkat and Harley brought in backup. Speaking of backup, what the heck is John doing right now? He’s been off in la-la land this whole time! You knew he’d lose it but not lose-it-lose-it. You should yell at him again and try to make him-

Karkat beats you to the punch.

He says your name. Ugh, same routine again? He doesn’t even _have_ to say your name first, you’re pretty sure he just misses crying it out in the midnight hour. Wink wink nudge nudge whatever. Although saying your name does do a good job of freezing you up, and that’s when John’s heart starts pounding in his chest.

That’s right, Joooooooohn’s heart. it’s totally not your fault that you’re terrified! It’s just… Just John’s automatic physical reactions, yeah, that’s it.

Karkat nods to The Blood, and a part of it flows somewhere behind you. It arcs over your head, twisting and knotting together in big brown-red streams, and you’d crane your neck away to look at what it’s making but John’s body is way too frightened to even think of going through with that! God, he’s such a weakling.

You realize what The Blood made for you when Karkat tells you to get in the body.

You _have_ to obey. You have to get out of John. You feel like eight thousand knives are slamming themselves up into your ribs and the only way you can pull them out is by shooting your soul out and away through some kind of bizarre meta-magic ritual. You don’t even know how you’re doing it, you just know that you _have_ to do it, and it’s only a couple seconds before you exit John and you’re in a brand spanking new custom made Vriska-shaped body.

Oh, wait, dammit, he made you _short_ again, didn’t he? Although he did make your tits slightly bigger, which, hell yeah! A-1/2 cup. Those push-up bra’s won’t know what hit ‘em.

Also, you’re naked, it’s raining, and you’re being held up only by the good will of a couple of strands of Blood latching around your wrists. You look down, which, oh no, that was a mistake. Your stomach does a barrel roll at how far up you are and you have to focus squarely on John’s collapsed body in Karkat’s arms to right it again.

Usually, you’d be able to sex your way out of this tight spot, no problem, but unfortunately John’s got all your powers and you used up the last remaining storehold seducing Karkat. Damn, you really hope you’re not going to be stuck as a lame, short mortal forever. You couldn’t imagine being _this_ unsexy all the time. No way, you’ll get your powers back from John at any cost once this is all over.

“John!” you yell at the sky. “Now’s a good time to fire those lightning strikes I know you have the ability to generate!”

His voice pops into your ear, on the left side. You’re not sure how he’s doing it, but it makes everything sound like he’s whispering words directly inside your brain. Although that’s more along the lines of Karkat’s trick when his language magic gets uber powerful, so you don’t think John’s _exactly_ doing some brain whisperer thing. It might be some kind of finagling with your eardrums. Rude, no one finagles with your eardrums but you!

“Um, am I not shooting lightning? I thought I was?” he says, with perfect pitch. “Oh, wait, sorry, that was somewhere else. Hold on, give me another few minutes. Physical space is just soooooooo old hat. It’s hard to, like, conceptualize this whole-”

Karkat says John’s name this time. You don’t understand what it means exactly, but your chest gets very tight when you hear it. Dang, is this body defective too? What’s up with that?

John knows exactly what Karkat’s trying to do and goes dead, dead silent. Quiet hits, yet again, like a heavy curtain. Rain from far away goes hush hush, the rolling winds stop ringing in your ears, and you can’t hear anything but a heartbeat you haven’t heard in thousands of years.

Karkat is completely undaunted. He extends his little Blood platform, and lets John’s old body crumple against it. He checks to make sure Jade Harley is still safe under one arm, then says something, short and succinct. It’s strong, dark, descriptive. It pierces through the silence. His voice echoes like heavy bells. Shit. Shit shit, super shit, if Karkat can trump John right now… you’re royally screwed. Even _you_ might have a hard time winning this battle.

You know what Karkat told John to do; it’s almost exactly the same command you got. A “get back in the body” kind of thing. Huh. Why didn’t Karkat get rid of John’s godhood too? Two birds with one stone is something that would make sense here. You wonder why he didn’t just add on a clause that was just “oh by the way you’re not a storm anymore, sorry.” Karkat’s a huge idiot but he can’t be _that_ much of an idiot. 

You wonder what kind of game he’s trying to play. Whatever he’s trying to play, he’s being stupid about it, and that means you’ve got a chance of winning. And you loooooooove games of chance.

The eye of the storm above you collapses over the top, graying out the light from the moon. The light comes up from below now, from Kanaya’s stars she put in the sky for some dumb reason.

The clouds begin to whirl together, like a mini tornado, and start to funnel into John’s old body through his back. At first the flow is slow, like a pathetic stream of clouds, but it gets faster and faster until your hair is blowing in every which direction and you’re having a hard time seeing. Karkat watches John’s body spasm underneath him like somebody watching the most boring sports game in existence. 

With one, final, whoosh of cloud cover, the sky becomes instantly clear. Stars that haven’t shown on the city for probably at least eighty years twinkle above and below you.

John looks like he’s melting as he tries to get himself up on the platform. Water keeps dripping off his arms, his clothes look like they’re not going to dry for centuries, and you have no clue where all that water came from. Is John, like, oozing it out of his pores or something? You bite your lip because _something isn’t right_ but you’ll be dammed if you vocalize any worry for John. That’d be really weak of you.

Karkat stares at John, then stares at Jade, then stares at John again, then you watch a light bulb go off over his head. Oh my god, he really _is_ that much of an idiot. Karkat opens his mouth to take away John’s godhood.

Although that gives you an idea! A really good one, one of your best. John might not be able to quiet Karkat, but he can do the next best thing.

“John!” you scream. “Drown him out!”

John follows instructions by making a noise like eight hundred bagpipes are playing their loudest note at max volume.

The storm slams back into existence above you. No eye this time, just instant heavy clouds and pouring rain and lightning. There’s a millisecond of HOOOOOOOONK before your apparently fragile eardrums blow out. You probably scream, you can’t tell. There’s too much high pitched _ringing_.

You also can’t tell if Karkat went through his ‘bye bye god-John’ spiel. However, you _can_ tell that Karkat dropped Jade like a total dumbass so he could slam his hands over his ears. Jade tumbles off the platform, Karkat comes to slow realization that he just dropped his girlfriend like eight million feet, and proceeds to cut off all access to The Blood so he can also tumble eight million feet to the ground with her.

Holy shit, he is _really_ out of it. That’s the stupidest choice anybody could make in the history of-

Preventing The Blood from getting up this high also has the unfortunate side effect of removing the straps around your wrists keeping you in the air, and you feel gravity explode in your chest as you begin to fall.

“John,” you scream again, hopefully, you’re having a hard time hearing stuff over all that ringing. “John, do the windy thing!”

He does. He flies out of nowhere to catch you around the waist with hands that feel like ice, and holds you close to him as you spin and tumble ungracefully towards the ground. You fall through stars and wind and rain and cold and you’d cling to John if you could but he’s just too slippery! Your head kind of sinks into his chest during the fall, and you get water and fog in your eyes and _oh my god, John isn’t solid_.

You come to a skidding halt against the tip of a building jutting from the ocean. John takes all the torque from the landing, turning himself so you land on top of him. You slide a little bit back down the angled slab of concrete, so your ankles and John’s legs are hanging off into the ocean. It’s so warm down here at a normal sea-level, which is good, otherwise your nipples would be poking John’s eyes out _so hard_ right now. You sit yourself up on your knees, straddling John. You take a good look at him.

Just kidding, there wouldn’t be any pointed nipple de-eyeballing here. He doesn’t have anything in his sockets. He only has clouds.

They flood out of his lids, dripping down his soaked cheeks, oozing through his hair in brilliant blue and gray. His glasses, which are still somehow on, are fogged up as though you were in a hot swamp. You take a quick look back at his legs in the ocean, and his black dress pants seem to fade into the water like spilled ink. He is clearly having a hard time holding himself together.

Your hands clench without any input from your brain. This… This isn’t what you wanted. Not at all.

He overrides the ringing in your ears with his own voice. 

"Vriska," he begs, but not through his mouth. It's too filled with water to make sounds. "Vriska, please, I can't get out. Let me out, I don't want to be here. I'm all itchy and gross and- and I'm going to freak out! I'll lose my mind! Please, please put me back!"

He claws down your arms, blindly trying to grab them. His hands keep slipping through you, turning to air when they hit your forearm. You scan his face, panicked, for some clue to _fix_ him. You’ve got to fix him, you’ve got to stop him from hurting, or… Or you’ll feel really guilty!

"Just hold on for eight seconds, will ya? I need to think!"

Your hair stands straight on end, and a lightning bolt cracks down on a building not fifty feet away from you. Thunder boils through the clouds above you. Spinning, circling clouds begin to condense over the top of you, in preparation for a tornado or something. The wall of wind starts to close in. It's pouring literal buckets of warm water.

He starts to gargle under his ever present sound. His mouth overflows, gushes down his cheeks. "Vriska, please! Please, please, please!" 

If John wasn't a total fucking nun, you'd be able to draw him back into his body with some sexy dancing. And if you weren't completely out of juice, you'd poke and prod him with needles until he was forced to pay attention to you. You try to pinch his arm really hard, and your fingers slip and slide over his skin and you can't get a good grip at all. God, you don't think a person could be any more sopping wet than you, but he feels like he's made of glycerin. 

You try kissing his cheek. He tastes like licking batteries in the middle of a power plant. Pure, sweet storm water floods into your mouth and you have to throw your head back to wheeze it all out, but then you get rain up your nose and have to sneeze and god, everything _sucks_.

"What are you doing!" you say, snorting water out your nose. "You're going to kill me, here."

It starts to hail, lightly, and you know he's doing it to fuck with you. He whispers, with great effort, "Sucks... to suck…” in what is probably an attempt to do something other than have a mild seizure. Water gushes out of his ears. “Also… there was… a pun there. Wat-er you doing. Haaaaaaaa.”

You don't think he understands the severity of the situation! Hail is not a prank, they leave weird looking hickey bruises without all the fun. You grab him by the shoulders and start to shake him, trying desperately to keep a grip.

"Okay, you can stop it from storming, now!" you say. "We’ve made our point! All we have to do is get you back to- I mean, take out Karkat now. If you keep it up there won't be anyone left to be god-kings over!"

"It's not storming!" wails John. He can't remember the sound of his voice, it keeps switching pitches. "This is nothing! This is like, a breeze or something. If I were myself again, now that would be a cool storm. C'mon, Vriska, stop playing, we were having so much fun. I mean, minus the you making out with Karkat part. And him being an asshole. This just really hurts me! I'm really, really in pain! It's like I want to scratch all my skin off, ha ha, but I know that wouldn't do anything and I don't think I can move my hands anyway! I don't want to use them, they're so lumpy and wrong and bluh."

You tug at your hair and make a bunch of frustrated noises. This is all going so wrong, and none of it is your fault! You hate when other people's incompetence messes your plans up. And you hate when someone you care about- Wait, not _care_ , John’s just a pawn. Stop those… those _feeling_ things, you’ve got to focus.

"I can't turn you back into a storm, John!" you say. "That's only something Karkat can do, and he's being the hugest tool right now!"

John snaps his head up, tufts of fog oozing out of his eyes. "Is that all? Well, let's just make him fix me!"

He doesn't wait for your response. A huge gust of wind sweeps under you, and you go flying through the air, screaming in a completely dignified and totally expected manner. You manage to right yourself in the air, so you’re sort-of next to him.

He doesn't propel his body to fly, like he was doing in the past few weeks. Instead, he uses the air to move his body around so it looks like its doing something other than being his prison. He must really hate being in his portable meatsack.

He directs the both of you to where Karkat is. And the rest of the motley crew, apparently. 

Karkat must have just found Jade, because he’s plucking her out of the water and The Blood is currently flooding into her nostrils to repair any damage she suffered from the fall. The rest of The Blood has resumed its role as “Ugliest Cape in Existence” and spans his arms and back and legs and the water like those pond skipper bugs.

Terezi’s boy-toy’s got the bike parked on something that looks like a giant rock, Kanaya’s got her legs crossed on the back of it in the way she used to do when she was bored with one of your _amazing and not boring at all_ stories. Terezi is currently yelling irrelevant stuff at Karkat.

“Do you _want_ Jade to be stuck inside you forever? And I mean that in the non-sexual way!” says Terezi. “It’s going to be very difficult to trump me, you know how terrible you are at mind delving! Especially into your own head! Let me get her out!”

Karkat tells her he can do it himself. There’s some stuff about lack of trust in there too. You’re surprised he isn’t just caving to Terezi, like usual. God, their breakup must have been the worst! Wish you could have been there for that hot mess.

You and John land on a third chunk of whatever. It looks like some dumb three way standoff triangle. You and John on one concrete slab, Karkat and Jade on another, and the rest of the losers on the third. Terezi’s boy-toy gets flustered by your nudity, which is hilarious because he’s literally the only one who does. You shimmy at him. You slip a little from all the rain but there’s no way you didn’t pull it off perfectly.

“Karkat,” sing-songs John, his head lolling forward. His feet aren’t touching the ground, just hovering above the concrete. “Karkat, I want to be myself again. Put me back.”

Karkat replies with something about how he can’t because Jade didn’t want him to do that. Ha ha, Karkat’s such a bitch. Then he says stuff about how this storm is, in fact, really annoying, and although Jade didn’t specifically say to squash out the storm, he’s definitely going to remove all of John’s powers because John is apparently _the worst_.

You grin, but for some reason you’re not feeling it. “Just try it, Karkat. John’s going to make you eat those words.”

He flicks you off, then before he can say anything, John sends a gargantuan gust of wind at Karkat. Karkat is blown backwards off the platform with Jade, and you see a splash of water as he and The Blood hit the ocean hard. You give John a thumbs up but he doesn’t see it, choosing instead to stare at the ground like he’s a zombie.

When you look at the angle of his jawline, an angle that you want to run your thumbs along and kiss (but… but not in a tender way!), you get a pang in your heart you haven’t felt for a long time. Maybe… Maybe you don’t want him to win this.

Ugh, no, stop thinking that, that’s stupid. Think about the greater good, here! Who cares if John’s suffering as long as you and him come out on top at the end, and everybody’s lives will be better for it. The ends justify the means, after all.

You see Karkat’s hand come up from the water to grab the edge of the platform. Then the other hand. Then the other hand. Then the other hand? Then. Wait, what.

He hefts himself out of the water, all eight limbs of him. Oh hurrah, he’s got eight limbs! You’re glad he was considerate of your needs. He’s also much, much larger than before, and you can see him growing bigger with every blink of your eyes. Wow, he hasn’t done this in a while, he must be getting desperate. The only time he ever changed his body size and ligament number was when he wanted to intimidate like, opposing nations or something. He stuck Jade somewhere, you’re not quite sure how or where and you don’t want to think about it. You watch as he crawls himself over his platform and leans forward with all six arms to try and stare John down.

He begins to say something like, _you’ve really pissed me off_ but John doesn’t let him finish. You slam your fingers into your ears.

John begins to play a song.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr post for this image: [here](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/130521130092/if-youre-always-trying-to-get-to-the-topyou).


	6. I've Got Rhythm, I've Got Music

**God of Storms, Wind, and Sound**

_Supertyphoon Marsha, Vriska's Bedazzled Hammer, Assistant Organ Director at the Ex-Largest Catholic Congregation in Seattle (1917-2015 RIP Sicknasty Cathedral)_

* * *

Karkat’s kind of hard to see due to your meatbag’s poor vision and a terrible case of fogged up glasses, but he looks like some kind of bizarre human centipede right now. You want to laugh at him, but using a body-voice would make your organs itch and you don’t want to feel _any_ more uncomfortable than you already are. You just want to be back, and normal again, and having fun! Everything is so disorienting the way you are now. You can’t even tell where the heck you are anymore, the scenery is just pure water and your clouds and rain and lightning and storm as far as the eye can see so you figured you all went out to the ocean at some point.

Vriska said you can drown him out. And you trust and adore her, and you also don’t want this weird god of pain to hurt her anymore, so you will follow her instructions to the letter. If he did anything to her, if Karkat forced her to do anything, or hurt her or even killed her… Oh, god, you would go _off_ on him. You would destroy him. Heaven hath no fury like John Egbert.

You need a really loud song for this, and you need something right away before he starts chatting you up. The first thing that pops into your head is Music History 101’s third favorite piece, The Great Gate of Kiev, with its huge swell of brass and orchestra. You just go for it with a simple thought, a simple “I’d like to play this,” like you’re trying to get the song stuck in your head. [You use, you know, the good arrangement. With the organ part.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3e4Bw-46Rc)

The bells begin ringing all around at mezzo fortissimo, echo throughout your real body's clouds and everywhere else in Seattle. Then comes the organ buildup. You remember it physically-- quarter notes, quarter notes, eighth, eighth, speed that sucker up... Your fingers itch so you shake them out. Karkat's staring at you like you're trying to explain an abstract algebra algorithm to him.

The sudden brass section hits him like a semi truck, and he puts all six of his hands over his ears and curls himself inward, trying to get away from your sound. He’s screaming in ugly tones of gray and red, which totally messes up your groove! You just pump it up louder so your own notes override his in a gorgeous painting of gold and blue and purple. Like, you know you’re loud but you can’t be _that_ loud, he must just hate this piece. It’s his own dang fault he doesn’t have good musical taste, but that doesn’t mean he has to scream through your performance!

Although you notice Vriska’s screaming as well, with teeny tiny blue lines, and you guess she must have poor musical taste too. Lame! Who the hell doesn’t like Modest Mussorgsky? Must be a weird ancient god thing. So you take pity on her and direct your music only to Karkat with a swish of your hideous meatbag’s wrist. Like you learned how to do in those conducting classes you took at college.

The music only gets louder, but through no fault of your own. It’s just written into the piece! Karkat grows a couple _more_ arms and tries to reach out and strangle you, but you just flit backwards a bit and his hands swipe at your wind. And then he crawls forward on the waterlogged concrete and you keep flitting backwards as he lunges and stumbles and falls into the water and climbs back up again. 

The volume changes to something quiet, something solemn, the awe of the Great Gate represented in a flowing melody. Oh shit, you weren’t thinking ahead, this part gets pretty quiet for a while. The quietness makes it hard to drown out Karkat while preserving the integrity of the piece, but the show must go on! You won’t ruin this great song just because you’ve got to save yourself. Some things are just more important.

Besides, the quietness gives you an opportunity to berate him. You fly up higher into your clouds, speaking right to him with your thoughts. Your blue sound-line dives towards his covered ears like a dart. “Karkat, give me back my body! I don’t care about… about whatever else you’re trying to do, just make me whole again!”

Karkat uncovers his seven ears and stares up at you. Flesh melts from canals. He asks you to repeat what you just said, and you _have_ to, so you do.

He tells you that Jade wouldn’t want him to do that, and also, that you should go suck a dick. You’re pretty sure you’re only _barely_ able to resist the order because you’re more of an abstract concept at this point and physically can’t manage that, and also because you _really_ don’t want to have sex for like… another eight years? You still have to grit your flesh’s teeth though and try not to think of cocks.

“Karkat, why are you so terrible in every way!” you think-speak. You gather up the lighter, fluffier parts of yourself over the top of you, in time to the music. “I don’t want to hurt you, but I can! And you look like some kind of horror movie monster right now so I won’t even feel that bad!”

He really does. He keeps growing and shifting, all those tattoos multiplying and slurping up more of that gross brown-red stuff as he shambles up and towards you. He’s about to reply with something but you’re at another loud brass part, and your many sound lines cover his up. Eat it, Karkat.

You get what Vriska was saying now when she wanted you to target Karkat. That you could do whatever you wanted with the weather. It’s easier when you have eyes, even though your glasses are clouded up. The fluffy parts of you grow black, you feel lighting crash through your muscles and nerves to the beat of the measure, and as though you were conducting an orchestra you direct them all at Karkat.

Bright lightning comes up from the ocean and crashes into all of his arms. They start on fire and get burnt and fall off into the water, and new ones ooze out in their places. Karkat grows and grows and grows. Like some kind of freaky Hydra.

His hands jerk and lunge like he’s doing some kind of weird model posing, like he can’t get his fingers bent out of these screwed up claw shapes and is just learning to deal with it. You fly higher, not wanting any of those things to grab onto you, and he gets bigger to match your height. Not only in sheer mass of limbs and faces, but also like, physically getting bigger. Those many pairs of giant red eyes are squicking you out, so you ready something besides lighting. You’ve got way more weather patterns in your arsenal than just shots of electricity, and you plan on using them. Your wind swirls and swirls around you in many cones touching down and against the ocean, and you feel the cooling sensation of them sucking water into their vacuums.

“Karkat, c’mon, I don’t want to keep setting you on fire, it’s not very funny or nice.” It’s kind of quiet again, so you can talk over the music. It’s like your own personal vocal solo! “I don’t think Jade really would want me stuck like this? Why don’t you ask her again if you can set me free, since you’re apparently her bitch forever?”

He tells you she’s safe for now, that he doesn’t want her hurt by you (how could you hurt her? She’s your sister!) and also, no. And to avoid a repeat of last time, you insert the sound of a clown horn honking loudly to cover up whatever Karkat tries to say next. You figure you’re forgiven for this grave sin against Pictures at an Exhibition since you’re trying to stop a god of language from talking over the performance, but then you remember you’re literally the god of music and nobody needs to forgive you. You’re kind of in charge here!

You warp your tornadoes to him, slowly at first, sending your smaller ones before the larger ones to symbolize the buildup and crescendo in the music. He just takes it, lets so much of himself rip off and crumble in a bloody cacophony of tornado it acts as some kind of wind barrier and doesn’t get to the core of him. The amalgamation of his body parts grow back instantaneously, six billion arms and all. If you cared about your stomach, it would probably be doing flips at how gross it all is. Like a high budget slasher film with skin dissolving effects. But you continue on, sending massive spans of yourself spinning towards him as you sway your flesh’s wrists to the time signature pattern.

One of your massive tornadoes hits him, just as the music gets quieter. Karkat tells it all to stop, tells all the weather to freeze as your lines fail to cover his own. And you’re forced to freeze everything! The tornado stops against the largest semblance of his shoulder, stops ripping it to spattered bone and blood and muscle and wacky tattoos, and stares at you as he readies a speech to probably take away your godhood.

But you’re not freaked out! Because the best part of the song is coming up, the reason you picked this piece! The grand finale.

It’s the good and loud part of the song, the part with all the trumpets and organ and lots and lots of cool shit happening. You make it extra extra loud and Karkat screams over it and tries to cover his ears with way too many hands to be plausible but ha, fuck him, he can’t ruin your piece no matter how hard he tries. You kick off your tornado again, the biggest one you can muster that’s already drilled a quarter way into him, and continue to tear it into his flesh.

You’re pretty sure this isn’t hurting him, just kind of inconveniencing him. It wouldn’t hurt _you_ if the roles were reversed, and you’d probably consider it a good thing if he were ripping you apart. Besides, Vriska said he was into this sort of thing, right?

Karkat tries to recover after your massive windstorm, tries to grow himself back, but you’ve got way more up your sleeve. You’re chopping at the weird mass of him, and you make your rain so heavy it’ll leave bruises on his weird fake body blobs. You conduct more lighting at him in time with the lovely low baseline flowing through the piece. It just melts and burns more skin off of him, and your unwanted nose picks up the scent of a campfire grill that got rained on. Burnt flesh. Makes it itch, but you ignore it for the music. Someone’s got to conduct this music, and you can’t do that if you’re bothered by such shallow things as noses.

It’s loudest now, the final stages of the movement, your absolute favorite part of the song. Karkat gives up trying to yell at you, gives up everything but his scream as he desperately tries to grab you out of the air. But you are wind, you are rain and water and sound, and you are just as unconquerable as any of those elements. Your storm amasses over him, demanding he restore you, demanding he succumb, demanding he appreciate this _seriously awesome_ climax. Like, it’s so cool! How can he not be into this song? Karkat is such a square.

Karkat tries to send out his disgusting red liquid to capture you, but it’s beaten down by the intensity of your rain, beaten away by your wind and force. You hurdle your real body into him like a goddamn musical train, and you watch as he takes the full brunt of your wind and rain and self, ripped apart by not quite _everything_ you have, but enough to hurt and maim. Maiming and hurting in the ‘fun’ sense of the word, since he’s probably okay with that? Karkat sure is weird.

You whittle Karkat down to something resembling his normal body, with one head and one face and only a couple of pairs of arms, but he’s still huge and screaming. You send one more lighting group at him, just for the sake of the fantastic last couple measures. You hold it there, watch him burn and repair himself over and over as your music comes to a massive, fantastic end. That was a damn good organ part, you really enjoyed playing it.

And then, of course, comes the applause! You stop trying to fight Karkat to take a brief bow. You do a little flourish with your wrists as you bend at the waist, because you thought that was a great rendition of the piece. You straighten yourself back up in the air.

Karkat opens his massive armspan, so massive it disappears into the grayness of all your clouds, and you think it’s nice that he’s clapping for you before he… claps you. He slams both his hands around your meatsack so you’re made into a John sandwich with two palms.

Your sound goes silent. You think you’re dead for two seconds before you slide down between his palms like water, then fall like raindrops to the ground. You fall through your own clouds and fog, fall like your rain through all the stars hanging too low in the sky for some reason. You hit a slab of concrete, spill over the top of it, then your droplets are forced to reconvene because of this dumb physical body thing you’ve got going on. You lie there, on your fleshy back throbbing with a dull pain, because you’re kind of in shock that just happened. Karkat is too big to see his face up above you, since all your fog and clouds and rain and winds and some stars are in the way.

Another face comes into your view as you lay on the platform. Some tall girl with weird skin and horns who has lots of glitter all over her black outfit. She's leaning over you. She’s frowning so hard you’re surprised her face doesn’t melt off like Karkat’s. You have a feeling you’ve seen her before…

“Oh, hi, Rose’s girlfriend? I guess, technically, ex-girlfriend?” you speak to her, a little confused. “I didn’t know you lived in Seattle.”

“Hello John,” she says in a distinct jade green. She has to yell over your gentle rain and hail and wind. “I will not dignify those incorrect statements with a response, due to how completely out of it you seem. Instead, I would like to inform you that you just killed your lover during that expert musical number.”

You make your voice sound like the epitome of being totally lost when you tell her, “I don’t have a lover? That’d be a really old-timey thing to have.”

“You murdered Vriska.”

You note that your heart is still functioning when it stops.

“And I would also count Dave as well, although he is technically immortal and trapped under a couple tons of concrete and water.”

Another girl leans into your view. You forgot her name, but you’ve seen one Snapchat of her. You couldn’t forget those sharpened teeth. She looks _pissed_. “I’d count Dave as a murder too! Considering the PTSD this kid is going to have, his mind will be completely trashed for a long, long while. We can never go on a date to the beach together again! How am I going to see that ass in swimtrunks? RIP, Dave’s attractive butt in a swimsuit.” 

“And do not forget the motorized bike.”

Dave’s girlfriend puts her hand over her heart. “RIP, Jade Harley’s soulmate.”

You look at the both of them with eyeballs that sting with something salty. When you open your mouth to actually use your voice, the corners of your lips start burning and you have to scratch them as you talk. Hot water floods over your mouth and fingers. “Wait, what? I don’t get it, how can I kill anyone? How can I kill Vriska, _my_ Vriska? I’m just playing music! I’m just after Karkat! I can’t have killed her! I can’t!”

Dave’s girlfriend looks at Kanaya over the tips of her glasses and spits out every one of her words. “Aw, cute. _His_ Vriska! Too bad you made her drown and I had to _watch_ her mortal lungs choking on-”

She’s interrupted by a loud splash in purple. The concrete you’re on shivers. You sit up as they turn towards the source of the noise.

Karkat is still huge with a couple extra arms, and is hunkered down in the water, so his hands are on either side of the platform. He points a free finger at Kanaya, the tip of which is about as big as her head.

“ _You_ ,” Karkat says in twelve languages, none of them American English. “ _You took Jade._ ”

Dave’s girlfriend throws her hands up and groans. “See! I told you this would happen!” She turns away from Kanaya, folds her very wet arms over her very wet clothes, and tries to stare Karkat down. You imagine she’s having a hard time with this because he’s about eighty times the size of her. “Karkat, please, for the love of everything that we once had, please please listen to me. Pull Jade out of your head right! Now! Or let me do it. I have a feeling that she’ll want you to _immediately_ bring everything back to the way it was before the end of the concert, and I think everyone here would also appreciate that gesture.”

He grins, all three sets of teeth, and says, “ _I don’t think she’d say that. That wouldn’t solve anybody’s problems, would it? For one, I’ve still got to make her inferior piece of shit brother mortal as per her instructions, and secondly, why bother with that right now when I have to take immediate steps to eliminate the competition?_ ”

“Karkat, I am your friend. I am not competition.” says Kanaya, with a flat green line.

“ _Yeah, well, friends generally follow the ‘bros before hos’ mentality, and you clearly did not think of that rule before you attempted to steal her. I mean, we at least could have had a nice talk about a love triangle before you attempted to force *sharing* her on me,_ ” he says, leaning forward. “ _You know I’m the kind of motherfucker who keeps a list of grudges in his bedroom and you’ve got to pay up sometime._ ”

His hands raise up from the platform and makes a motion like he’s going to clap the three of you to death. “Up!” Dave’s girlfriend yells, and it doesn’t take any thought processing at all to know she’s directing that command at you. You gather your wind underneath the platform, and raise your meatbag and the two of them upwards as fast as you can.

You’re not high up at all when Kanaya yells, “Stop!” so you do. You all hover in the cloud of stars that exist in your storm space for some reason. You try to ask Kanaya what she was thinking by stopping you here, but your mouth itches too bad.

She’s frowning. Her legs are crossed, and she looks so poised beside you as you float in the comfortable galestorm air and rain. Her short hair flutters against the glinting lights of the weird nighttime you’re in. She blinks at a star, reaches out, and encloses it fully in her fist.

She vanishes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr post for this image: [here](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/132390147642/here-i-amsick-guitar-lickrock-you-like-a)


	7. The One-Night Stand

**Jade Harley**

_Karkat's Endless Heart, She Who Frightens Everyone at Sturgis, Too Badass to Function_

* * *

You don’t have time to register that Terezi vanished, because you are currently frying way bigger fish. Way bigger, dripping, ickier fish melting towards you. And you’re too freaked from that mindfrick of a novel you were just in to do anything but RUN!

You try to turn and book it, but you’re wearing a hobble skirt that is, ripped or not, literally made to inhibit your movement. So instead of running, you trip and faceplant on the very first step. And you don’t have time to try to get back up! You catch yourself on the floor, push yourself onto your back, and get ready to lay a kick to the hollow Karkat. 

The empty library aisle with its flickering light only makes the whole scene way more dramatic than it needs to be. The hollow Karkat falls apart directly above you, pieces of clay that you and Terezi stuck on him sloughing off with spurts of that velvety red water from inside him. The softer clay simply oozes off him like butterscotch pudding. He maintains his body shape mostly, all straight lines and a pleasant waist shape, but the details of him are getting all wet and mushy. His mouth stays intact, perfect lips on a mostly-perfect face with bottom eyelids like the curve of an empty pot. The part that terrifies you the most is that you still think he’s pretty.

You kick him anyway, yell, “Get away from me!” and aim above his dick. You feel the impact, then the puncture of a membrane, and your foot sinks right into him. The hollow Karkat doesn’t even flinch.

You start feeling a little more panicked when you feel your ankle hang in a gap of nothingness where his pubic bone should be, as glue-like skin oozes over it. And you can’t even take these weird antique boots off to try and get free because there’s too many buttons and clasps and ugh! You try pulling your whole leg back but the hollow Karkat just comes with, getting tugged towards you by your leg fastened to him and leaving a trail of skin along the library floor.

You hear his shins splinter and he crumbles over the top of you like a dam breaking. You put your arms up to try to stop him, but when your palms hit his chest there’s that weird feeling of a membrane getting punctured, warm water, then another membrane and your arms are through his back. He oozes into you, fitting your body while you struggle to move around his half-formed, waterlogged torso crushing yours. He opens his mouth against your ear. You hear the click of spit. You know that if he says your name in this library, or says anything really, you won't _just_ be reading about your hypothetical nonexistence! He’s weird and primordial and powerful and you don't want to die! You shut your eyes hard.

He says something completely incoherent. Random humming sounds, scratchy, somehow sexual? Maybe it’s just the position you’re in. Oh, goddammit, you are so DONE with all these off-kilter erotic situations with Karkat.

You pelvic thrust up really hard to flip him and you over, and the sound of his clay skull cracking against the floor makes your teeth clench. You tug one of your arms out of his chest as he tries to pull you back down with his own limp arms, but he’s got the strength of sticky spaghetti noodles so it’s not very effective. Your arm makes a suction release noise as it exits the hole you made in Karkat, a big gush of neon red flooding up after it. Your hand with the goop all over it tingles as though someone were trying to give you goosebumps by stroking you gently.

You look around for something to hit him with. Or at least something to shove in his mouth so you won’t have to worry about that threat. Your eyes spy the book on the ground that started this whole mess. It’s pinned open against the floor, its water stained red cover looking like a mighty good weapon to wield right now.

You reach for it, stretching yourself as far as you can go to fumble your fingers around the edges of the cover. You get a good grip, pull it towards you, pick it up by the spine with your free hand. The pages are getting all wet from the velvety gunk on you, and it’s hard to get a grip on the book when it’s open.

You shut the book. The hollow Karkat and all the liquid on you vanishes. You hit the floor.

When you try to go over why _that_ all happened with your face firmly pressed against the wooden floorboards that smell like your 1930s high school gym, you come to the conclusion that it was probably pretty obvious you should have tried closing the book from the beginning. He was from the pages themselves, after all.

You sit up, clutching the book to your chest, making sure it’s firmly shut. Your hands tremble as you set it back on a shelf, and you rub your palms on your thighs to try and still them. It doesn’t work. C’mon, there’s no reason to be scared! You’ve been through way worse shit than this, you can handle a little aftermath of watching and physically feeling the creation of the universe. It’s no biggie.

You get a little frustrated with yourself that you’re not calming down, so you try to focus on the issue at hand. You must have let go of Terezi, which means that you’re stuck in here. You remember she said the exit from Karkat’s head was tricky, and you sure as heck don’t know how to get to it. You’re hoping she’ll come back for you, but… What if things aren’t going so well outside? What if you have to get out yourself?

You stand up, and walk out of the creepy flickering aisle. As you head down the library rows, your eyes play tricks on you, and you keep seeing the shadow of the hollow Karkat out of the corner of your vision. But when you snap your head to look, there’s nobody there. And you keep feeling the soft, warm dripping of his skin-liquid down the back of your neck. Of course, when you put your hand there it’s perfectly dry. You really need to stop freaking out! Nothing is happening! But it doesn’t help that you’re wandering through the silence all alone, only the pitter patter of rain on the windows offering any sort of background noise. You head to one, try opening it, but its welded shut. Of course it is.

You head down another aisle to another window. This one’s welded shut too. You pull on it anyway, but it doesn’t move no matter how hard you pull and scrape your nails against the lead edges.

Panic crawls up your spine. Claustrophobia presses on your shoulders. You decide you might start hyperventilating if you stay here alone any longer. If you weren’t freaking out for no reason, you’d probably start snooping through Karkat’s memories at random to see if you could find anything useful. But right now, you just want to feel safe.

If it’s comfort that you want, you’re technically surrounded by every iteration of your fuck buddy from across time and space and myth, and you can take your pick from any one of them. You decide you are going to get a very specific type of Karkat. The type of Karkat who gives the _best_ hugs.

Post-orgasm bliss Karkat.

You hurry to NONFICTION JA-JZ. You stop at the front of the aisle, and scan the titles for your name. You find two pretty green books, sized about as big as an average best seller, labeled “Jade Harley” and covered in flowers that look like you scribbled them there yourself.

Terezi got like, twenty billion rows of really thick books, and all you get is… two measly novels. At least they’re hardcover? One of them looks brand new, like he just got it in the store, while the other looks like its been read a bunch but still kept clean. Terezi’s looked like he never took care of his books, or he read them over and over again way too much. Your chest aches when you see that. You think it might be because you know _exactly_ how Karkat feels about you. Seeing how small a part of his entire life you are, that you’re maybe 100,000 words out of trillions and trillions… Jeez, now you _super_ don’t understand why the hell Karkat adores you so much.

You pull out the thinner, newer one, and open it up. You figured that book one contains the first part of your month with Karkat, while book two contains the second part, but as you thumb through the pages you realize that book one contains literally every memory he has of you. Which kind of makes you wonder what’s in the second book.

You sit down on the floor. You flip towards the end, and begin reading a passage that starts when you were in John’s guest bedroom. Your eyes unfocus on the words, your mind goes swimming, and you’re laying in the dark in bed with Karkat. And you’re naked and tired and he’s warm and wearing the softest cotton imaginable and he’s pressing his lips to your temple. And you’re tempted to just stay here, because it feels so nice… but then you think about how your sort-of real body is alone in a library that contains a book about some kind of abomination of the guy who’s gently kissing you right now, so you stop reading.

You know to keep the book open this time. You set it down flat on the floor. You wait, sitting in the middle of the aisle, and it isn’t long before Karkat appears standing on top of the open pages. He’s in boxers and that ‘got jesus?’ shirt that he wears like once a week despite having no idea what it means. You haven’t told him to stop wearing it yet, even though it’s silly. He shuts his eyes with a “mmph” noise from the sudden change in light. You let him try to blink them open to observe what’s going on.

“Oh, great, snatched out of the place I love the most to the place I _hate_ the most. The place I hate the most out of literally everywhere else on this vomit spewing semi-mortal coil,” he says, trying to look around. He spies you through his squinting. “You know, I could have sworn I was just having a fantastic, memorable, magical one o’clock in the morning cuddle session with you, and yet here I am.”

“Yeah, I think that was the best blowjob I’ve ever given?” you say, trying to remember what happened that night.

“Right, whatever.” He dismisses you with a wave of his hand, and his eyes open a little further. “So, what, does that mean I’m a memory? Fuck, it does, doesn’t it? Can I stress this any more? Out of every mythological plane of existence that exists in our twisted, fucked up backstory, this is the one I want to be banished into nonexistence the most. I _hate_ my musty old thinkpan, and am sorry that you’re here. How are you here, anyway?”

He must be adjusted to the light in the library because his eyes open way too wide when he observes you on the floor. You can’t tell if he’s appalled at the 1900s outfit you’re in or what, but it makes him step off the book pages and crouch down to your level.

“It’s a long story,” you say, thinking about how to summarize what happened.

He stares at you instead of responding, then quietly says, “Jade, you’re shaking.”

“Am not,” you say. You hide your hands behind your back. “It’s just cold in here.”

“Unfortunately this place doesn’t come with an electronic temperature control,” he says, but it’s pretty clear from his face that he doesn’t believe you. “Good thing I’m a fleshy radiator.”

He helps you stand up with him, and it’s not long before you’re pulling him to you by his waist and cozying up to him. He wraps his arms around your back. You bury your head in his shoulder. He smells like bedtime.

Ah, yes, you needed that.

“I don’t know what the fuck’s going on,” he says into your hair. “But I’m here for you. What’s up?”

You let him hold you a little longer before launching into a brief explanation of what happened. “Brief” ends up being in quotes, though, because Karkat drags you to a reading area when you’re only a quarter way through your story. It’s a huge comfort to you when Karkat is just as appalled as you when you tell him about all the things he did, from getting kind of crazy and gross during the storm to melting all over himself when he was an old god. When you finish your summary, you’re holding a chipped mug you drank all the instant hot chocolate out of, sitting in a comfy cozy armchair. Karkat’s pulled up a wooden chair near your knees which he’s sitting on in reverse, legs spread around the back of it.

He blows on his third cup of hot chocolate when you finish. “Oh, right, past-past-me was horrible. I hated being him. Shit was always falling off of me at the most inopportune moments. Although it’s your own damn fault for being one of two ditzes in a bad horror movie trope and picking up the book in the first place. You sure you’re okay?”

“What, yeah? I’m fine,” you say, circling your finger around the edge of the mug. “It was just weird! Totally not scary at all. But I think the real moral of the story is… I kind of want to get out of here. Do you know how I can leave?”

“Nope,” he says, and your hopes sink. “Could never leave my own head without Terezi. You’re stuck here until she comes back for you, and she will. But at least you picked the best version of Karkat to hang out with while you wait.”

“Sure, Karkat,” you say, rolling your eyes. “So, what should we do then? I noticed you’ve got a FICTION section in your head, and I’d bet anything there’s at least one book labeled ‘Jade Harley.’ Want to go through your secret sex fantasies about me?”

“Neither one of us needs to read the awful daydream past-me thought of which involves a ranch hand and a lot of dust in places it shouldn’t belong. You’re the buff cowherd in assless leather chaps and I’m the supple town boy with no place to stay, if you’re curious,” he says, sipping down his hot chocolate. “Again, let’s keep that cosplay waiting to happen under wraps forever.”

You giggle, imagining that spectacle in your mind’s eye. You bet Karkat has more than two books when it comes to his erotic fantasies about you and what he dreams about you. If you’re going to be here for a while, you’re definitely going to _make_ him show you them. “Oh, by the way, what was that other book about me in the nonfiction section? I mean, there were two, and one of them was all your memories… So what else can you possibly have about me to fill up a whole book?”

His lighthearted scowl, which is one of the many weird expressions he has, fades away into something darker. He furrows his brow and scans your face, clearly trying to think of what to reply with. You get a little worried about what’s in this book with that look he’s giving you.

You watch an idea pop into his head, like his eyebrows raise and everything, and then he gets this really stupid cocky smirk. Now you’re _really_ worried. You have a feeling this conversation is going to get real weird real quick.

“I suppose I wouldn’t have told you, would I? My future self is too much of a coward to do so, as are all my past selves,” he says. “But my future self hurt you, so fuck him. I will take any chance possible to screw him over, and trust me, you’re going to despise the guy after I tell you what’s in this so-called ‘other book.’ _De-spise_. As usual, it’s left up to me to dish out the scathing, bizarre truth.”

He takes a swig of his hot chocolate, the heat not bothering him. “That book contains your life,” he says.

You’re a little surprised. “Oh, so… like, a representation of it or something? Like a symbol for it, since you ate my heart?”

“No. Not like that. I mean it contains a recounting of events. I’ll clarify, as is my sworn duty as the god of language,” he coughs, clearing his throat to launch into some kind of rant. You’ll pay attention to this one, though. “One thing that I’m equipped with is the ability to glean personal information about people based on the type of sacrifice they gift me. I don’t know why the fuck I can do this, but it’s probably got something to do with empathy or whatever. A lot of good that did.” He pauses to snort as his own sarcastic joke. “Anyway, a little bit of blood spilled for me means I learn their name or profession. A neck slit for me and I know some important life events that happened in their past. A whole life and their arguably most important organ? I think you can do the math. What’s in that book is everything I know about you.”

You just about drop your mug. He’s certainly _implied_ that he knows more about you than he lets on, dropping comments once in a while that vaguely hint at your past life events. You figured it was a coincidence, or a weird ‘patron god’ side effect. But now that you’re aware he knows a heck of a lot about you… that's horrifying on so many different levels. That book was big enough for a very detailed biography about you, and if anyone is going to write a biography about you, you want it to wait until AFTER your final death. Out of all the people you want to let into your metaphorical heart, Karkat is definitely not at the top of the list. "How much is that, exactly?"

"Not a lot. Like I watched an elaborate montage of your life through an interstellar one way 3rd party video chat client. All important events, some minor ones, a couple of your personal thoughts here and there. About your dog, about Strider, about how you can’t keep long term friendships, about how you killed your grandfather."

The mug in your hand cracks down the center. The handle cracks too, but that’s less of a metaphor and more because you grip it so hard.

“Oh, come on, what’s that look for? I don’t judge you for an accidental firearm misfire, shit happens. It made you a much more well-rounded character in my literary viewglobes,” he says, and he’s almost smirking. He clenches the arm of his chair. “Anyway, that reveals why I never asked about your life. Didn’t you ever wonder why I never asked about your life?”

This is a _big deal_. Soul crushingly big. That stuff is personal, that stuff is yours and yours alone, and NO ONE ELSE’S. Your vision is swimming with a whole bunch of emotions and you can’t possibly hope to process them all in time, so you group them all together into pure, unyielding anger.

“I thought,” you say, and your voice is hot bile in your throat. “You were respecting my boundaries. I just wanted something casual. I didn’t want you to know actual stuff about me.”

“Well, we can’t all have what we want, can we?” he says, digging his nails into the wood. “Boundaries have been firmly shit on, my future self having clearly dropped trow and absolutely decimated said borders of decency. He wouldn’t have wanted you to know that I have your entire life memorized cover-to-cover, but here I am. Ruining his plans.”

Karkat knows you’re pissed off at this revelation. All your life you've hid things, memories, details, whatever, from other people. You've always been afraid of the day when something, _anything_ , comes out of the dark and exposes itself for who you really are. That you're vulnerable and lonely and infuriatingly passive and unsure and tired of everything. You thought the world would come crashing down. It's almost more terrifying that the only consequence is... absolutely nothing. The only consequence is that Karkat likes you _more_. That’s sickening. Your body feels like it's freezing up, and you get very very scared of some ineffable, dark hole welling up in you.

You make motions on your cracked mug like its his neck and you’re wringing it. You let free the flood gates, not holding back. “Why the hell did you tell me that!? You KNOW I’m a private person, you KNOW it takes me years and years to warm up to somebody to be close enough for me to tell them that kind of stuff, _if I ever even do!!!_ You can’t just skip ahead and cheat and get to know all my super private, super personal information right at the beginning! That pisses me off! You didn’t have to tell me that! I want to _hit_ you right now! God, like, are you really, really trying to sabotage your so-called ‘future self’s relationship with me!? Do you really want ‘revenge’ on yourself that badly!? That’s insane! You’re sick! That’s really, really sick, Karkat!”

“I’m aware,” says Karkat. For once in the whole span of the time you’ve known him, Karkat is acting calmer than you. “But I also brought that detail out into the spotlight to elaborate on why the hell I’ve been acting like an obsessive chump around you. To put it in the context of the shitty, uncreative symbolism of my mind’s library: you’re my favorite book. You’ve got a climax, symbolism, allegories of the human struggle, a personality so deep and complex it threw me for a loop when I had to re-examine my initial impressions of your character. The more I read you, the more I went over and over your life in my head, the more I fell in love. I wanted to be a part of your narrative. Even without me, you are a fantastic story. You are best seller material.”

You can barely manage any coherent thoughts besides for a very long string of “aaaaaaaaAHHHHHHHHHGGHH!” He thinks your life is a plot! He literally thinks your life is a plot!

“Now that makes it even weirder!” you say, yelling despite yourself. “I thought you were just in love with me because you’re cheesy and silly and believe in all that love at first sight crap but now I know you’re _obsessed_ with me! You’re obsessed with my life! You’re so creepy, like I thought that the god thing and the sacrifices and the blood and the hands and the afterlife were creepy, but nooooooooo, this obsession thing totally takes the cake!” 

“Don’t act like it’s one way, you massive shitmonger. You’re obsessed with me too, but in the opposite way.”

You’re almost too shocked to fight back. He looks at you scowling and dead serious and you’re having a hard time trying to think of how he could have gotten that weird idea into his brain! He is so wrong, so so wrong, and you’ve got no idea how to react to that extremely wrong accusation so you say, “Karkat, I am _not_ in love with you!”

“Did I say that? No, I said ‘opposite.’ You know fuck all about me, because you’ve never bothered to ask,” he says, not breaking eye contact with you. “So no, you can’t be in love. You’re in deep, deep _lust_ with me, so deep that Vriska probably would have given you some kind of trophy for it back in the day. She would have stood up and slow-clapped whenever you entered a room. While you might be able to get me to do anything for you by manipulating my feelings, I can flip that shit on its head and manipulate your gargantuan boner for me. I could even do it right now, even when you’re mad at me and even after _two_ godawful versions of myself attempted to weirdly take advantage of you. I could make you do anything I wanted, without using my voice commands, even if it involves a fetish you despise.”

This is a lot of information to process and your blood is basically boiling at this point, so you just yell, “No you couldn’t!”

“I can and I will!” he yells in reply, then stands up with such force he knocks over the chair underneath him. He kicks it to the side. You’re having a really hard time seeing how he can supposedly ‘manipulate you’ when he’s a total idiot who is being COMPLETELY unattractive and terrible right now!

He slams both hands down on each arm of your chair, then as a second thought, yanks the mug out of your grip. He tosses it aside, and it vanishes into thin air. He stares at you like he’s trying to shoot laser beams into your eyes, and there’s no way in hell you’ll be beaten like that so you stare right back. He takes your chin in his hand, sneers at you, and forcefully turns your head away from him.

You can only see him out of the corner of your eye when he puts all his weight on you, more or less falling against you so you can’t move. And he’s warm and still smells like bedtime and you vaguely remember how nice that particular night was with him (how nice ALL nights are with him) and that stops you from fighting back. You make the tiniest little ‘nngh’ noise when he presses his lips to your ear. You’re like Pavlov’s dog when it comes to sexy whispering and your god of language at this point, and you tense up in preparation for whatever he’s going to say.

“My favorite concubine, my slave, my empty girl,” he purrs into your ear. “Beg for me.”

A small voice in your head screams ‘okay wow that’s the cheesiest, grossest thing I’ve ever heard, and also completely inappropriate right now!’ and tries to sound off the alarm bells, but the remaining parts of you are flooded with the fantasy of a swole glowing Karkat taking you over his altar from behind. He’s thrusting into you while holding your wrists behind your back and making you worship him, and making you scream his name, and you’re also in a Slave Leia costume for some reason, and you are SO INTO IT. 

You’re about to beg for him. Really. Even after all the boundaries he’s violated. Even though you’re in the middle of an argument. You turn your head against his grip to kiss him. But you notice something about Karkat that pulls you back into a more sane state of mind where you’re NOT some kind of angry sex fiend. 

Karkat is very, very tense against you. His wiry, ungodly form is so incredibly tight you can actually feel what little muscles exist on him instead of the usual fatty tissue. He’s so wound up he’s shaking, so stressed out about something that it makes you question what his motive is with all this. The anger starts to clear from your head as you begin to actually analyze the situation.

You thought that his stuttered, clenching motions were a side effect of him trying to work himself up to berate you, but now you think it might be something else. You’ve seen this pattern before from him. Karkat, for all his language, is really really bad at lying. He’s got a perfect voice, but he just can’t consolidate his words and actions. He’ll say something really confident but be wringing his hands together, or be shouting when his body is screaming ‘hug me gently.’ He’s doing that now. He’s nervous and stressed, but acting cocky. Not exactly lying, no, he knew too much about your life for that, but he’s trying to warp his words. Trying to twist them so he’ll piss you off.

Karkat is trying very, very hard to make you hate him.

You come to the realization of what’s probably his end goal here. Your stomach ties up in a big knot.

He shuffles himself off of you when you freeze before the kiss, stands up, and folds his arms. He starts talking in his less sexy normal voice. “Told you. Told the fuck out of you. If I present anything, literally anything, to you on a sexual silver platter, you will up and do it for me without question. Doesn’t just go for weird male power fantasy shit, I could do it with, like, vore or something. I could do it with showing you a riveting slideshow of vaguely phallic vegetables. I actually get secondhand embarrassment over how much of a slave to lust you are. Good thing I’m so benevolent and wouldn’t take advantage of you for selfish reasons… unlike one of those dirty mechanophiles who manipulates her boyfriend’s heart to get what she wants.”

“I didn’t marry my motorcycle!” you say, not paying attention to what he just said. You’re lost in your thoughts, and your objections come out half-hearted. “I just… really liked the name Harley, okay?”

Karkat sounds calm, but now you can see the slight shake in his arms as he gestures. “Right. I guess the real point this sludge of accusatory metaphors is heading towards is that our relationship isn’t healthy. I know you think I'm the densest motherfucker in the American empire, but I've been around the block a few times when it comes to romance. Believe it or not, sometimes I can be perceptive. I know how people tick, I know how _relationships_ tick, and I can weave and dive my way around them like some kind of aquatic Olympian. And I know this isn’t right.”

Here it comes. But you don’t want to say it, or even think it. You just glare up at him, watching him shiver.

It’s a long staring match before Karkat finally comes out with, “… Break up with me.”

He gets down on his knees then, forcing himself into your vision. He’s between your own legs, and he grabs your hands and holds them in your lap with an earnestness that makes you pay attention. “You deserve so much better. You deserve someone normal. Break up with my future self. Dump the shit out of him, Jade. I'm not healthy for you, and I’m not a good fit for you. Please."

Your first reaction is a solid ‘no,’ screamed in your head at six different pitches of Jade. Karkat is too hot to let go of. And usually they say those things won't last forever, but in your case they totally will! Karkat will never ever not be hot, and you'll never ever not be hot, and you're pretty sure the sex will never ever not be hot. Like, being with any human will be a letdown after him, he basically raised your expectations through the roof.

And as you think about it some more, you realize the bigger reason you keep him around is because he comforts you. A lot of that is from the physical intimacy, yeah, but some of it’s because he deeply cares about you. He cares exactly the same way Dave did, but you don’t have to worry about Karkat’s emotional fragility or lack of communication like you had to with Dave towards the end. All in all, you stick around with Karkat because he makes you feel less lonely. It’s hard to get sad when someone’s screaming at you from the back of your bike, or flicking peas at you in the middle of some nowhere American diner, or whispering the _best_ sweet nothings in your ear.

But all the points Karkat argued for come right to the front of your mind. He’s an asshole. And he’s terrifying. And he’s violated your privacy way too much. And you manipulate each other in an unhealthy way. And he apparently knows all your deepest, darkest secrets, which is something you actually want to punch him for. Maybe, _maybe_ he might be right.

Your eyebrows fold down of their own accord. Your bloodstream starts hammering almost louder than your voice. “How can you say that so easily? Doesn’t it hurt?”

“No. I’m a memory,” he says. “The guy outside has to deal with the fallout. And he can go stick a knife in his skull for all I care. He wouldn’t tell you to dump him because he’s selfish and greedy, but I literally can’t progress beyond this moment in time so blatant honesty is wiggling itself out of my mouth hole to fuck over my future self. Jade, I swear to fucking god that this is what I think is best for you. I love you and you *need* to split up with me to stay sane.”

He squeezes your hands again, noticing that you’re not as pissed off as him as you were only five minutes ago. He says, “I shouldn’t know all that shit about you. I shouldn’t give you these divine nightmare adventures once a month on the regular. I shouldn’t want more than you’re willing to give, and vice versa. Nothing’s worth that. Not our talks. Not our rides together. Not the sex. Nothing.”

You bite your lip. “I dunno, the sex is really good…”

“Okay, yes, fucking you is probably step one to achieving nirvana or whatever, but it’s not worth your discomfort,” he says, and he blows his bangs out of his eyes. He sounds tired. “On top of all that, you’re clearly not ready for a relationship after the shitshow that was Dave Strider, and admittedly, jumping headfirst into the shallow Do Not Dive area of a relationship with *me* after a two fucking day breakup recovery period was not the best idea you’ve ever had. Out of all the aquatic beasts in the sea, I am the worst rebound you could have picked. Please, for the love of every god on this earth, please break up with my future self.”

“I don’t know,” you say, because you don’t. “What if that's... what if that's not the right thing to do? What if I regret it?"

He sighs. “Then you come back. You ask to try again. A couple months, years, a decade or two. Doesn’t fucking matter to me.”

“What if it’s a hundred years? What then?”

“You say ‘pretty fucking please’ and bribe me with a Mississippi Mudslide, extra ice cream, easy on the Kahlua.”

“Two hundred?”

“Then, as I’m walking out of a movie theater on Mars after watching _Casablanca_ for the 600th time, tears streaming down my face after that emotional whirlwind, you can wait for me off the dusty red road,” he says. “And you can be leaning against your antique motorcycle wearing sunglasses, and there will be a sunset behind you and I’ll see you through the glare and you can wave at me and say, ‘Up for another adventure?’ And I’ll get on the back of your bike without a single complaint, and then we blast off into space because there’s no fucking way you haven’t outfitted your motorcycle with rocket thrusters by that point.”

“Oh,” you say, and your mouth turns up into a smile. “That’s so silly.”

“It’ll be true. Just watch.”

You still don’t know though. He’s staring up at you like he expects an answer right this minute, but you feel confused and emotionally wrecked and you don’t think you can. These past couple hours have been too awful and too hard on you that you’re not sure you can make a decision like this. You think you need to talk to him some more about it. Just with this Karkat in particular, you have a feeling _your_ Karkat will be in a lot more emotional turmoil if you talk about it with him.

And, ugh, you’ll have to go through all this again with "future-Karkat," too. Except he won’t have the emotional dissonance between his future self and his past self like you’re getting with this memory Karkat… Your Karkat will probably start crying.

You hear someone scream in the library. Like one of those frustrated screams when you can’t solve a problem. You and Karkat blink at each other.

He stands up, ready to punch whoever this is out of commission or something. Which is silly because he’s got a terrible constitution and couldn’t manage that when he’s in his mortal form. The frustrated rage scream only gets louder, and before long, Terezi jumps out from behind a nearby shelf and begins storming towards the reading area you’re in.

“You!” she screams, pointing at you, marching towards you. “We. Are. Out. Of. Here! We have about ten seconds before he wakes up! And then you are going to make him-” she points at Karkat. “-fix everything! By the way, you look like shit, hubby.”

“That’s because I just got pulled from a chapter about me getting laid, _wife-y_ ,” he says, flicking her off with both hands. Terezi ignores him, storms up to the chair, reaches around you, and grabs both of your wrists like she were trying to fuse with you. Your memory Karkat looks at you helplessly, mouths a desperate, ‘good luck,’ and Terezi pulls hard on your arms.

You find yourself lying down in the middle of a storm, rain on your glasses, lost and confused and empty.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr post for this image: [here](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/133387222037/hey-you-remember-where-we-first-metokay-i).


	8. And the Day is Saved, Thanks to...

**Rose Lalonde**

_Light of Kanaya's Life, Space Explorer Extraordinaire, Star #7382eb-a879124_

* * *

You are having a fabulous time vacationing near the most _fascinating_ red dwarf when Kanaya appearifies in front of your vision sphere.

This is shocking for a couple of reasons. One, Kanaya told you she would never call you unless it was a dire emergency, for it would surely expend the last of her energies to get to you. Two, you have no idea how she even found you in the first place, as she tried to find your star on a three dimensional coordinate map one time and she nearly fell over with spirals in her eyes like a confused cartoon character. Three, she’s looking wet and looking like she woke up the wrong side of the bed, as it were. Usually she looks pristine, happy, and dry when you talk to her. Well, dry for a _little_ while at least. Wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more say no more.

You craft a human form to interact with her, your “Rose-o-gram” as you fondly call it. You enjoy staying in your ‘abstract spiritual representation of a star’ form, but on occasion you enjoy having a physical body to touch and be touched. Yet again, wink wink, nudge nudge, say no more say no more.

You move your Rose-o-gram to face Kanaya in the great sparkling void of space, then move your great omnipresent ‘camera’ to your Rose-o-gram’s eyes, turning this third person shooter game into a first person one.

You raise your hand up to your chin, getting a feel for the body you put yourself into. “Don’t tell me,” you say, recalling the tone of your voice. “I lost track of time again, but this time instead of a mere twenty four hours it was twenty four hundred _years,_ and the land has slowly sunken underneath melted ice, therefore turning the Earth into a poor-man’s _Waterworld_ remake. Can you blame me, however? The universe is just so _fascinating_. Do you know, there are giant, ancient eldritch beasts hovering in the vast voids between galaxies?” You throw your hands down like a double karate chop. “Aliens.”

You were mostly teasing, but Kanaya doesn’t take this with good humor as intended. Instead, she sighs as water trickles down her face. “Oddly, that assessment was somewhat correct, although you will be relieved to note it has only been about eighteen hours since our last chat. I have contacted you as a last resort, and also because I brought the stars closer and it was far easier to arrive here when I set your location myself.”

“Oh, my love,” you say, and you grab her hand and hold it to your chest with a shameful amount of earnestness. “You brought the night? I would have given anything to see that.”

Your complementary words fulfill their intended purpose of cheering her up a little (although, seriously, you literally would have killed someone to see it.) She smiles and says, “Yes, it was incredible. And also, how do you say it, ‘heavy metal.’ I was on a flying motorcycle.”

You open up your mouth to make a joke about Hagrid from _Harry Potter_ and also ask ‘what the fuck,’ but these opportunities do not arise because she continues talking.

"I will briefly go over what happened and why I need your help." She holds up her fingers in order to count through a list of items one by one. "My deity ex-girlfriend returned from the dead. She proceeded to make your friend John Egbert into a massive storm and possess him. To stop this, my old friend Karkat attempted to restore himself to power, but also ended up being driven somewhat mad. He is carrying around the empty corpse of Jade Harley and probably trying to backhand John into oblivion. At this point, John is placated personality-wise and Karkat is our biggest challenge to overcome because I theoretically stole his girlfriend."

You look at her like she's growing a third arm. She appears to be undaunted by this. She holds up another finger.

"Oh, and the entirety of the Pacific Northwest is destroyed. That one almost slipped my mind. But, in theory, Karkat should be able to return it and its cities to its former glory, if he or Jade ever come back to their senses. Jade will be able to convince him to bring the coast back, so it does not matter which one of the two is returned to sanity first."

You look at her like she's growing a fourth arm. "I leave for one whole year and this is what happens to Earth? Kanaya, I am ashamed at your behavior."

She swoons, in mock fashion. "Dear me, whatever was I thinking? My loneliness got the better of me, apparently, and allowed me to contrive this tangled series of events which I otherwise had no hand in. What a catastrophe." Her face gets flat again. "Although, in all seriousness, we could use your help. We are at the end of our wits."

"I'd love to save the northwest coast. They had good coffee and better hipsters," you say, deciding to take her at her word. This situation sounds like you can deduce what happened later through a long, languid conversation with Kanaya. Right now it appears it's time for action, which you've been missing out on in your passive space playground. "But I don't see what I can do."

Kanaya ruminates on this. You watch her lips purse in thought, and you flick your eyes to them. You missed that look she gets when she thinks. You haven’t called her in _hours_. You forget sometimes: a whole year of wonder and exploration in the starry universe cannot compare to the beauty of your dearest Kanaya.

"Well," she says, softly. "Karkat always had a poor constitution."

You think about this.

"... Ah. This sounds like I need to dress up for the occasion. Do I need to dress up?"

"I would recommend black velvet."

"You're the boss."

You snap your fingers, and you are wearing a black velvet gown. You didn’t need to snap, but you like the dramatic effect. Kanaya looks you up and down in the best sort of way, squeezes your hand, and says, “I will take you back.”

There’s a whoosh of space and stars that at this point you are very much used to, and you are floating above broken concrete surrounded by ocean water in the midst of a terrible storm. One of the worst you’ve ever seen on Earth, although it is nothing compared to the great gales on that lovely yellow-orange planet you once visited with the interesting avian populace. You avoid getting wet because you do not will your Rose-o-gram to be wet, but you feel the rain on your face and the hail on your arms and the wind blowing all around.

You instantly recognize the god of flesh and blood. It’s hard not to, as he’s gargantuan, wearing a hole filled cape of blood, and appears to be swatting something far up like he’s trying to kill a fly. You zoom your ‘camera’ upwards to see that one of those somethings is John Egbert, looking like a half-melted Popsicle in a fancy dress shirt. Next to him is Terezi, a god you had passing contact with when delving into Dave’s mind. She’s got her hands over her face as the wind whirls her around, in the way one would do when they were having extreme secondhand embarrassment. You think you would like to be friends with Terezi.

The god of flesh and blood, you believe his name is Karkat, _commands_ the two of them to stop fighting him. John appears to combat this by slamming his hands over his ears and somehow generating a bunch of trumpet noises to drown out the words. You hear the command just fine, and as you roll around the wonderful, gorgeous, eloquent, unpronounceable words in your head, you realize something. You realize something important.

You realize you have a plan. And it is assuredly devious. Karkat is going _down._

As Kanaya uses her night cloak to run from your platform over the water (and oh, is she beautiful), you wave up at the battle with both hands. You yell, as loud as you can, “Hey, big guy, down here!”

They all stop. Terezi looks down at you over the rims of her glasses. John doesn’t appear to recognize you, he looks lost in his own world. Karkat rotates to you, huge and looming, many armed and many eyed and horrible.

He asks you who you are. By the way he asks the question, it's quite obvious he knows exactly who and what you are and is just being infuriatingly rhetorical. It also would have destroyed you if you attempted to answer it— if you were at all susceptible to this, it would expend a great amount of effort for you to prove the very core of your identity to him. You're not sure if he realizes this.

"I can't hear you from all the way up there," you say, calmly. "Would you please come down?"

He actually does. He seems like the person who would look up when you informed him gullible was written on the ceiling, and then get genuinely mad at you when he discovered you tricked him.

He keeps some excess arms, and keeps the proportions, but other than that simply looks like a Greek statue. Muscular and tall, built out and terrifying, three heads higher than you and solid as a tree. He's holding Jade now and she's dangling from his side, her body seeming so small tucked under his arms. You'd be terrified of his stature if you were mortal, but you're far more than that now. You're _science_.

You raise yourself up, float to his face, and hover as daintily as possible so you're staring him right in the infinite red eyes. Admittedly, those sockets unnerve you a bit.

He asks you who you are again. You answer, but only because you want to.

"I am one of Kanaya's stars. It's a pleasure to meet you, god of flesh and blood. I've always had a morbid curiosity relating to who you were, and it's wonderful to see you've lived up to the hype. Although holding Jade captive in low budget 1950s pulp film manner is a twist I didn't expect to see. Are you perhaps romantically involved with her?"

His lip curls. He tells you something, tells you quite a lot of things, actually, but you manage to digest it all under a comprehensible sentence which consists of _fuck off_. With the emphasis on the going away part. A terrible and strong command, indeed.

You don't.

"My apologies, you'll have to speak up. I have a small special need, and require minor accommodations." You mock-sigh. "Although I suppose it doesn't matter. My dearest doesn't want you saying any more deadly nonsense to her and my friends, and I am inclined to rescue them."

He replies with something comparable to _fuck off, and *then* die_.

You don't. And when you don't, he makes a face at you which you can best describe as a wolf finding out the rabbit he's eating is actually made of chocolate.

"You're probably wondering why your language does not affect me. You see, I am far, far beyond what your myths and legends ever accounted for, while also having the advantage of being a part of one. In short, I'm not _quite_ present right now. You can think of me more as a hologram, while my body is spinning somewhere far off in outer space. And in outer space, no one can hear you scream, as the saying goes."

He yells something at you. You ignore it. Technically, you can’t even hear it. You don’t have any ears.

"You poor, limited, depreciated god of flesh and blood. My name is Rose Lalonde. And _my_ flesh and blood-" You throw your arm back. "-is _two billion_ light years away!"

You deck him in the face.

Kanaya was absolutely not kidding when she said he had a poor constitution. You knock him silly with one hit. The arms vanish, Jade flops to the ground, and he instantly shoots down to a more average height and less than average muscle structure as he's thrown back from your punch. He hits crumbled concrete and metal with a dull thud, the blood surrounding him making a beautiful splat sound and laying lifeless on the ground.

You admit to yourself, as you blow off your knuckles, that was the best right hand slug you've ever thrown.

John and Terezi float down to you. John hovers himself over Karkat and Jade’s unconscious bodies, while Terezi takes the more rational approach of stepping herself down onto the concrete.

“Whoa, Rose, is that you?” says John, but his mouth flaps don’t match up to his voice. Also, it’s too weirdly perfect, something that came out of a technologically advanced autotuner as opposed to a human throat. He flips onto his back in the air and looks at you upside down. His eyes infinitely melt out of his head in tufts of fog and rain. “Ha ha, if you’re not dead, then who else isn’t dead? Everyone? Probably no one is dead. Why are you here, have you come to help me get my body back?”

“Er…” you say. You have absolutely no idea what he’s talking about. Terezi, standing behind him, begins to mouth ‘say yes! Say yes!’ at you. Kanaya, who is in the midst of night-running over the water back to the platform, is also furiously nodding at you. “Yes, John, most assuredly, that is what I came to do. There is no question about it. You will get your body back, my dear boy.” Terezi begins to point at herself with urgency. “And Terezi is here to help me do so.”

John flips mid-air and turns to Terezi, who has on the most _innocent_ grin. She says, “Yes! I will need to get Jade back to do so, however!”

“Oh!” says John. He floats away from Karkat and Jade. “Have at it, then!”

Terezi hops over what appears to be a mangled bed frame to get to Karkat and Jade. She presses her palms against both their foreheads, and concentrates on something. She freezes, unblinking, and you realize she’s mind diving.

You wait there with John and Kanaya, awkwardly. “So,” you say, glancing at John. He appears to be attempting to itch his forearm skin off. “How’s life?”

“Meh,” says John, shrugging.

You glance at Kanaya, who is staring firmly at the ground. Thanks for helping with this conversation, Kanaya. You wait there for a couple more seconds in silence before Terezi jumps back to life, springing away from the two foreheads. Jade sits up like Frankenstein’s monster, and looks around as though she were lost in the woods. Empty. Shellshocked. Unbelievably sad. She spies John and quirks her head in confusion. Then she sees you.

Her mouth drops, in horror. You weren’t expecting that, you were expecting her to cheerfully say hello to you. “Rose. Rose, is that you?” she says, as though she killed you herself. She stands up, her eyes wide and quivering.

She hugs you, tight, and she's taller than you so your hologram of a face ends up snug in her shoulder as she keeps her arms wrapped around your form.

“I never went to your funeral,” Jade says. Her shoulders heave as though she's dry sobbing. “You were all the way on the other side of the country, and I couldn’t- I didn’t have time- I went to Dave but I didn’t-”

“It’s quite alright dear, personal trifles are all irrelevant in the grand scheme of things anyway. And I understand we lost touch during college,” you say, patting her on the back. "Heartfelt reunions and the reinvigoration of our divine friendships can happen later, however, as I believe you have something important to do."

The god of flesh stands up behind Jade, rubbing his jaw and resuming his 'overcompensating for something' godly stature, excess arms and all. He sees her hugging you, and gives you a look that screams jealous, overprotective, helicopter boyfriend. You waggle your eyebrows at him.

Jade lets go of you and turns to Karkat, and you angle your 'camera' so you can see her facial expression. That same lost in the woods look is on her features, and she sounds underconfident when she says, "Hi Karkat. Um, I'm back. And I'd like to request one more favor from you... Could you bring back everything to the way it was? Except without the John going bonkers thing. At 11pm last night. Please, pretty please? I'll do whatever you want."

He strides to her, and you back your hologram off to give them the perception of space. Although you don’t back your ‘camera’ away, you want to hear and see everything they say to each other because you’re a horrible meddler. You guide Terezi, Kanaya, and John back with you, John following your gentle push like a helium balloon on a string.

Karkat wraps a pair of absurdly muscular arms around Jade’s waist, then another hand against her back and yet another tilting her chin up to look at him like a low budget romance novel cover. It is after what you believe is supposed to be some kind of mating ritual related staring contest when he expresses the concept of:

_No._

Terezi groans like she was an overdramatic middle school actress who just got stabbed. Kanaya hits her forehead with her palm so hard that you're surprised she didn't drive her hand through her own skull. Jade simply appears horrified.

"What? Why not? You said you'd do anything for me!"

He expresses the concept of ‘not having enough.’ Enough what? Time? Power? Blood? He doesn’t explain any further. He simply tells her he would rather spend time with her _now_ than bring back Seattle.

He closes his mouth again. Thinks about what he’s going to say, real, real hard.

“I love you,” he says for her, in perfect English.

“Yeah, I got that,” she mumbles. “Like a billion times. Karkat. I don’t care. Please bring the northwest coast back, I know you can do it."

He tells her she doesn't need it. Doesn't need anything but him.

It's such a laughably bad abusive power trope you're tempted to jot it down for a Kanaya-brand ghost authored crime novel you might dream up later. Although you're surprised to see that he doesn't actually lace his voice with any sort of command when he says it, which means he's trying desperately to give her free will. You suppose Jade wouldn't have stuck around if he "forced" her to stay in one place with him, and even in this state he's well aware of it.

Then he does something odd. You expect him to go in for a violent kiss in true romanticized abusive relationship form, but instead he goes to her ear, bending down in a way that screams 'I swear there's no ill intent here.' He begins to gently whisper sweet nothings to her.

When you expand your senses to eavesdrop further, you realize that the nothings coming from the god of blood's mouth are anything but sweet. They are NC-17, pornographic paragraphs filled with so many dick-related metaphors it was probably deemed inhumane by the Geneva Conventions. You have never heard anything more sexual in your life. And, by god, they’re fucking _gorgeous._ It’s poetry. Prose. Art. And if you weren’t a big fat lesbian you would try and jump him, just for those beautiful words. They are passionate things that you watch Jade Harley fall for hook line and sinker.

She melts in his arms, sighing, completely ready for him to participate in adulterous acts with her in the midst of rotten blood and an Earth shattering storm with people watching. You knew she had a hefty sexual appetite from a couple moments in high school pre-DaveJade which involved an absurd amount of underage drunken boob fondling between you and her, but, c'mon. Now? It can’t wait half an hour? Sure, he's poetic and has a nice use of metaphor, but he's not actually forcing her to appreciate it. You think she has a problem with addiction.

You hear John holler at them. “Don’t touch my sister! Don’t you dare defile her sweet, precious, innocence!”

Jade snaps out of it to turn her head and give her brother a look you’ve seen when her glasses were stolen once and she was trying to read faraway highway exit signs while simultaneously being confused about the directions you were feeding her from the front seat. Karkat detaches a set of arms from her to give John a classic ‘come at me bro’ gesture. John raises his hands to call forth some inane light show or another. Kanaya tackles him to the ground before he can recreate the bad parts of _Fantasia_.

Jade shakes her head to clear up her senses, then says, “Karkat, really? That’s the issue here? You’d rather spend time with me than do something nice for me?”

It appears there’s a bit more to it than that, but he essentially answers with _Yes_.

Jade, shuts her eyes, tight. She takes a deep breath, clearly gathering up the courage to do something drastic. With a serious tone you haven’t heard from her in quite a long time, she says, “What makes you think I _want_ to spend time with you?”

And that question hurts him, hurts him more throughly than your fist could ever accomplish. You watch Terezi’s mouth drop open and Kanaya’s hand find her forehead again. You watch John squirm underneath Kanaya’s butt as she sits on his back. But most importantly, you watch Karkat cave in on himself with just a subtle change in expression.

“Put me down,” says Jade, wiggling in his grasp. He does so. She puts her hands on her hips. “Look Karkat, you’re not going to _get_ to spend time with me if you don’t bring back Seattle. I’m going to break up with you right now if you don’t do it.”

Jade Harley: Ice Princess. You knew she was a girl who took an inordinate amount of time to warm up to somebody, which sometimes manifested in her making odd social faux pas or seeming cheerfully detached from everything. But she was never, ever this cold. Either she’s plotting or Karkat really fucked her up in some way.

Karkat gives her a look like she just wrapped her hands around his neck and he cannot possibly bring himself to fight back. He launches into a desperate rant, careful not to force her into something but lacing it with his feelings to try and trigger empathy in her so she will revoke her decision. Underhanded tactics. You’d applaud him if it weren’t in poor form.

He talks about how that’s not a healthy thing to suggest in a relationship. That shouldn’t they talk about this first? That he loves her and worships her and oh, god, he couldn’t live without-

Jade shoves her hands over her ears and starts making “la la la” noises. By the way she winces, you’re starting to think this is more plotting than an actual ‘I hate you, I’m dumping you’ sort of thing. Karkat doesn’t seem to notice this. “Karkat! I don’t care about any of that!” she screams. And despite her best efforts, tears begin to leak out of her eyes. “Don’t you get it? I don’t care about you at all! You’re an asshole and you’re too much and you’re so mean and I only use you for your body and you are _not worth it!_ You are not worth anything to me! I’m breaking up with you! If you want any chance, any chance at all of making things right, then you had better DO WHAT I FUCKING TOLD YOU TO!”

That makes him _livid._ He takes his hands and wrenches Jade’s wrists away from her head, freeing her ears. You and the other two gods lunge for the pair, to stop him from hitting her or eating her or killing her or whatever twisted thing he’s going to do, but you’re not fast enough. Not even with your star body.

Time stops, the world goes dark. You hear his voice in the void as he walks through pieces of imagery, descriptions of places and people. It’s a lot, words overlapping each other, words that sound like nightclubs and the chatter of people and taste like saltwater and chocolate and smell like freshly ground coffee and the forest in morning dew. And after jumping through hoops and hoops of linguistic mumbo jumbo within your thought processor, you manage to roughly translate it as

_Everybody back to normal, party’s over._

And the party’s over.

You stand at the base of the stairs to a church, moon above you, with seven other people and a cat. Some cars and Jade’s motorcycle are parked across the street. There’s a couple out for a walk at the end of the block. You hear the sounds of the city. You hear the sounds of conversation behind you in the church.

Just another night in Seattle.

You reach down to pet the cat with a bedazzled pink collar that says “Tina.” Why, hello Tina, aren’t you friendly. After you get the important kitty business out of the way, you begin to analyze the scene.

Everyone is thankfully dry and free from the storm’s effects. Kanaya looks like she's experiencing the kind of relief she once did when she realized you TiVo’d that new episode of _Masterpiece Theatre_ when she would have missed it due to work. Terezi is patting Dave on the back like she’s a tired single mom burping a baby. Dave (oh, you missed him, didn’t you?) appears very confused and is spitting out some water. There’s a completely naked, small, skinny woman you don’t know looking around in a panicked manner. John is acting about the same as her, but about eighteen times jumpier, no longer melting or foggy but twitching and tugging at his fancy suit. Jade stares at Karkat. Karkat, as thin and hungry and tall as Kanaya once was and wearing an ill-fitting suit for some reason, stares at Jade with normal brown eyes.

Karkat’s black tattoos begin to crust over with something like tree sap.

"Oh, god," he laughs, and you watch the weight of all his actions crush him body and soul. He takes Jade's face between his hands. With eyes that are madly, desperately in love, pupils so big they could swallow her whole, he tells her, "I'm fucking _starving._ "

His eyes fill with rotted old blood, his head rolls back, and he falls into her.

Jade catches him by the underarms, then looks around at the whole group like she just punted a puppy off a bridge. "Wait," she whispers. She shakes him a little. "Wait, no. Don’t fall asleep. Please don’t. I didn’t mean all of that. I take it back. Karkat, wake up. C'mon. Please? For me?"

Terezi comes to pat her on the shoulder, somewhere between consolidation and congratulations. "Yup, he'll be out for some time. Took him a lot of effort and power! Sorry, girl, you'll have to wait a while for him to wake up."

"How long?"

Terezi shrugs. Jade stares at his corpse with that same lost in the woods look. Dave proceeds to spit out a small fish, which flops on the ground. Tina takes it into her mouth and toddles off into the night.

Your attentions are turned elsewhere when Dave Strider begins barreling towards you like a train gone off the tracks.

“Rose,” says Dave, in a burst of unrestrained emotion. He grabs your shoulders. “Rose, what the fuck. You could have come and visited me at any point, and you stood your only brother up? I was waiting for you at the candlelit dinner of my heart’s poorly lit Italian restaurant for over a year!”

You’re taken aback. Was it really that long since you did anything on Earth besides visit Kanaya? Sure, you saw him in his mind last month, but... “Oh, Dave, I’m so sorry. Mortal matters seem very petty when I’m up there. It… it must have slipped my mind. But can your favorite half-sister humbly ask forgiveness and request a hug?”

“Nah, not humbly. But request it like you’re the goddamn Queen of England and I might be able to fulfill it.”

You twirl your imaginary mustache as you say with a ridiculous English accent, “My dearest brother! Shall we now participate in the great reuniting of limbs as our arms wrap around each other! I would indeed appreciate it!”

You watch him try to spit back a witty answer, give up, and with a sudden ‘fwump,’ he pulls you close. He squeezes you tight. You reciprocate the best you can.

You _did_ miss him. Very much.

The couple walking down the block gets closer. Terezi spots them, then turns to the naked girl and yells, “Get behind me, Satan!” and tackles her into the bushes. The couple walks past without incident, appearing not to notice a crusty looking tattooed anorexic male limp against a girl in a sparkling black dress.

“How’s Terezi? Are you still with her?” you ask.

He mumbles a response against your shoulder, more open and less ‘cool’ due to his emotional vulnerability at this moment in time. “She’s special, she’s my Buttercup ft. Ol’ Dirty Bastard. She opens me like I’m some kind of Shrek onion metaphor, just peels back the layers like you used to do but faster and hotter. Way hotter. And is it weird that I fucking love it? It’s relaxing, it’s like we fuck around with each other until we’re blasting double entendres about our personal problems in a 360 degree radius all over each other and then we have freaky weird emotional mind sex and it’s so fucking sappy and, god, I’ve never felt anything like what I do for TZ.”

“That’s nice,” you say, patting him on the back. “I’m glad you found religion.”

“I sing her praises every Sunday, baby.”

You’re honestly, truly, glad that Terezi saved him too. It’s easy to tell you’re related.

It is also apparent Jade and John are related. John scratches the back of his neck, clearly trying to willfully forget everything that just happened to him. Kanaya takes Karkat from Jade, and picks him up bridal style as though he weighed as much as a down pillow. Jade takes the opportunity to awkwardly pat John on the shoulder. They stare at each other like they both just witnessed a murder and don’t know what to do about it.

Dave unsticks himself from you like Silly Putty, and turns to the other pair of siblings present. “So, are you god-free now? No storms that murder literally everyone?” he asks John.

“Uh, yeah? I think Karkat took it away,” says John, nervously laughing and itching his stomach. “Let’s not talk about it again, ever? Please?”

“Well, you’ve clearly been fucked up forever and need some kind of spiritual calamine lotion. Hey, you know what would help a crushing sense of mortal awareness? Caffeine. We should go get coffee,” says Dave.

“It’s like, midnight,” says Jade.

“No time like the present. When’s the last time all four of us were together? High school?”

“Ha ha, not like I’m going to sleep anytime soon anyway,” says John, itching his forearms. “I’m down, but only if it’s local.”

“John, my bro, my main man, I will engage your hipster sensibilities and we will go to only the most obscure of midnight coffee joints. Ladies, are you in?”

“I am in,” you say. “Although I cannot partake in mortal beverages, I will surely enjoy the company.”

Jade gives a desperate, happy smile. “And I’m in too.”

“Are we invited?”

You all turn to the gods. You’re not sure which one of them voiced the question: Vriska or Terezi poking their heads out of the bushes? Or was it Kanaya holding Karkat? It doesn’t matter either way.

All four of you flip them off simultaneously. Jade performs the default gesture. John, with both hands. Dave blows a kiss to Terezi with his middle finger. You simply smile and release the manicured hologram nail. You then turn on your heels, and link arms with each other. You walk down the sidewalk arm in arm with Dave and Jade, and you turn the corner before you all start laughing in the _weirdest_ way. It ranges from Jade’s desperate ‘glad it’s over’ laughter to Dave’s ‘what the fuck was that’ giggles to John’s ‘why are we laughing’ vocalizations to your happiness at the joy of life and being on Earth. You get a couple stares from across the street, probably because your group consists of three overdressed people and one guy in sunglasses wearing a Mario Kart shirt, but you don’t think any of you care.

You end up going to some blues cafe because it’s the closest thing open. You annoy every other patron in the venue due to how long the four of you stay there and how loudly you chat over the music. You don’t talk about gods or lovers or apocalypses. You talk about life. You talk about good things. You and Dave, through elaborate pantomime, get Jade to laugh so hard she cries. John, on the verge of tearing his skin, finally becomes distracted enough to stop itching himself. He even makes you spill sugar on your lap as a well-executed prank, which is a feat considering you can make yourself immaterial at will. He starts talking about the music, how he thinks playing jazz organ might be fun. Dave suggests making a mix tape. Jade suggests playing double bass for it. You suggest being their ghostly manager.

Two of you are technically dead, one of you is basically owned by someone, and the final one might be a little messed up for a while, but as you swirl your finger around the rim of Jade’s third mocha, you can’t help but feel that things have turned out alright.

Life (and death) is good.

Real good.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This series ended up being very special to me, and I hope you all enjoyed it. Before you go onto the epilogue, I'd love it if you took a couple minutes to leave a comment! What was your favorite story in the series? What was your favorite part? Favorite character? Any overall thoughts? If you made it this far, you're all getting an award and a big thank you from me <3
> 
> Tumblr post for this image: [here](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/134501395197/but-in-my-heart-i-know-its-time-to-come-backcos)
> 
> **DVD EXTRAS:**  
> [FST [tfw you try to eat your gf]](http://8tracks.com/oxfordroulette/tfw-you-try-to-eat-your-gf) / [track list and art](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com/post/133777321502/tfw-you-try-to-eat-your-gf-underworld-series-fst)  
> [A Very JohnVris Epilogue](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5345465)
> 
>  **FANWORK GALLERY:**  
> [Jade Harley and the Rise of the Underworld book cover](http://paradoxsister.tumblr.com/post/132867004252/a-book-cover-inspired-to-jade-harley-and-the-rise)  
> [Jade Harley and the Rise of the Underworld fanart (jadekat on motorcycles!)](https://artaline.tumblr.com/post/161906839713/i-like-it-heavy-i-finally-started)  
> [Hella quality MS Paint fanart](https://vivalavidapasta.tumblr.com/post/162412711792/i-know-its-not-much-and-i-pretty-much-made-this-on)  
> [Dave Strider and the Bat Out of Hell fanart (theres too many damn daves all up in here)](https://artaline.tumblr.com/post/163289911183/sloppy-seconds-finished-the-underworld-by)  
>  (psst: if you write or draw anything, I'd love to see it! Drop me a link and I'll put your fanwork here)
> 
> And that's all! It's over. If you've got questions or just want to talk about headcanons and stuff, feel free to [head to my tumblr](http://oxfordroulette.tumblr.com). Or ask 'em in the comments :) Thanks again for reading. Here's the best pic I've ever drawn.


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